Oh, come on. Fuck this.
Can we ever trust a service to keep running for even a third of our lifetime?
Can we ever trust a service to keep running for even a third of our lifetime?
If you were paying them and they were making a profit then you might have a better chance.
You mean like GMail?
You would have at least thought they could integrate the MSN/AIM/Yahoo messenger etc into GMail.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/gmail-chat-aim-crazy-d...
The "cloud" really replaced "desktop computing"... And by cloud i mean Google and desktop Microsoft. But you knew that.
why buy a company that has no significant revenue? It's not like it's some shock to google - "oh no, meebo doesn't make enough money!?"
So... yeah, the services were provided 'free' in some sense, but meebo was able to continue running before this. Just... yeah.. buy stuff, shut it down.
If it's not a significant source of revenue, it probably doesn't take a significant amount of cash to keep it running for another 6 months to a year.
EDIT: I should have added, I understand the logical reasoning behind buying a company for its assets/talent. Doesn't mean it's not annoying.
Because users are often just as if not more valuable than the money a company makes. Google probably bought Meebo because they thought the product was a good fit for their new social direction and because it already has a user base.
As far as the services they're shutting down, most of them are in conflict with things Google+ does.
From the news they're only interested in the Meebo Bar installed base, which are not end-users.
Larry Page has been shutting down and consolidating divisions of Google for the last 18 months. This appears to fit his strategy at the moment. Why pay for two chat divisions?
They wanted the meebobar only, because it's cheaper than building their own, or it's too entrenched to compete against. Those are the only two plausible explanations that would make sense (to me, obviously) but neither actually make much sense when applied to Google.
Perhaps 6-12 million dollars is insignificant by your standards, but if they don't have the dough then they have to close up shop. You could argue that they could fire everybody and just keep a skeleton crew to keep the site running for a year, probably much cheaper. But what purpose would that serve for them? It would be a dead company at that point.
Not necessarily. A non-free service is unlikely to get enough traction to remain alive.
One datapoint is the massive amount of investment they took, and the amount of time they've been going. It was obvious they'd need an exit soon.
The only paid client I know of is Trillian Pro. They've been around for quite a while but I have a feeling it's a small company with low overhead. It would be interesting to know what percentage of their revenue comes from the paid pro version vs the ad-supported free version.
I can't count on my fingers the number of services I considered adopting (and vouching for) that were shot down mid-flight in the past year and half. It's getting to hard to trust any business for more than short-term commitment, not just unproven ones.