There is also the announcement that the people who started this company quit Google because they couldn't get anything done there and now they have a new startup...
It is probably true though. It must be incredibly stressful trying to make your product successful and to try and keep both your investors and loved ones happy. If a struggling company is acqui-hired it presumably offers some long-term financial stability and a return to a more sane lifestyle for the founders and employees.
When with enough PR-speak a big layoff or a complete exit from a market can be made to sound 'exciting', something like this really isn't so bad.
Getting acquired doesn't have to feel so bad for a startup. The optimist can see it as a way to continue working on their project without worrying about profitability or investors, and the pessimist still got paid.
A company that is well-capitalized and having trouble growing might buy a similarly-sized company just for the next couple quarters of revenue. Of course that isn't a good reason but it is an "immediate return".
> Your comment made me realize i can't remember seeing promising medium or small size companies merge and make this kind of announcement.
Small and medium sized companies merge all the time (but its rarely big news, because small companies), but "promising" ones in the Silicon Valley swing-for-the-fences startup sense probably don't as much, probably because that kind of merger doesn't provide the kind of exit startup investors are looking for or increase the perceived likely size of the eventual exit enough to warrant the dilution.
I'm genuinely excited about a lot of things, and I don't know that pulling out a thesaurus for the sake of avoiding that particular word would help anybody.
true.. the problem i suspect is people tend to idolize brands and products when they are young, precisely because they are young and are seen as the underdog. As they age, its incredibly difficult (I dare say impossible only for the sheer lack of evidence to the contrary) to maintain that reputation. As the movie saying goes: "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"
How dare companies shut down things that aren't profitable. Ever since Reader shutdown Google seems to be the "go to" reference, but the reality is that it happens a lot. Just look at all of the things Microsoft has either shutdown or discontinued. The list is longer than Google's.
I'm really curious how the acqui-hire model is sustainable given the disconnect between expectation and reality. Surely there would be internal models to see the attrition rate of acqui-hires and questions asked whether the money paid was accrued in the form of services to the company. I read somewhere that the acquisition team works on a model similar to an investment bank which kind of explains this disconnect between what's pitched and what eventually transpires.
Interesting acquisition considering they also bought Form[0]. Would love to see some designer-centric prototyping tools built by Google specifically for Android devices. The OSX/iOS ecosystem is particularly well equipped in this area, and finding good design prototyping tools built for Android is a pain point for many people in UX/UI imo.
The unique twist is that Neonto Studio generates real native code (Obj-C for iOS, Java for Android), so it's possible to use it even for complete apps, not just prototypes.
We're still pretty thin on that front. The public beta was released earlier this year and the feature set has been in flux. Most of the pilot customers have been building just prototypes.
Below are some iOS apps that were released on the App Store. These were 100% exported from Neonto Studio (that is, the entire app was created visually, and no manual modifications were made to the exported Xcode projects).
No, the generated code uses the native frameworks on each platform. (We basically have separate back-ends for each supported platform: iOS, Android, Apple Watch.)
It's "dependency-free" -- there's no intermediate runtime or framework involved. This keeps app sizes down, and also makes the generated UI code easier to integrate with programmers' workflows.
We started on this a long time before React Native was announced, so it wasn't even an option... However recently we've been entertaining the thought of generating React Native instead of the native UI frameworks. That would be a major pivot for the product, but if React Native takes off, it might make sense. What do you think?
As we have discussed before ;) I would think it smarter to allow developers to hook into the code generation process so it can be integrated in their own toolchain and processes.
Pixate has a middle term potential to fix the difficulties with designing and deploying UI's which require basic physics or animations. It has the long term potential to change native front end engineering as its currently done.
Potentially it could compress design, prototyping, and front-end dev into a single seat -- who is more design-forward rather than coding-forward.
I think the missing piece is still how app logic interfaces with the UI code outputted by these design tools. How do you do it so the UI can be updated without breaking interface with app logic?
Immediate-mode UI could be part of the solution, but I still can't see a complete solution that wouldn't piss me off as a developer.
The humour is that they always announce that thanks to the big corp the product is going to sky-rocket, but after 6 months or so they shut it down.
It's probably great for the founders, not so much for the customers who trusted them and allowed them to grow to the point of being noticed by Big Corp.
Given the corporate interest, it sounds like Pixate has an easy exit ahead of it, if they so desired, but Colton says that’s not the route they’re taking right now. “We want to see how broad this can be,” Colton says. “It’s really a big change in how you can build apps,” he adds.
It's been on my to-do list for the last few months to start playing with Pixate. Can someone knowledgeable on this share their thoughts on what this means for the Pixate tools going forward?
* Pixate Cloud is $5 per seat per month, or $50 per year
* Pixate Studio licenses will be refunded as a credit toward Pixate Cloud
Otherwise, no changes for now it seems. It's a very nice tool for simple prototyping for UX flows, animated transitions, and visual layout. A fantastic tool for designers.
Was on the "Check it out" list for IOS. Guess I can cross it off as Im sure IOS support will go first then the entire product later to the great google product graveyard.
That wasn't their initial product that I even paid for.
Not that I minded, I actually liked their initial product until it got open sourced (but abandoned)
I wonder if they would have been acquired by Google if they had open sourced their software. Don't get me wrong - I completely understand your decision.
> I wonder if they would have been acquired by Google if they had open sourced their software.
The software [0] he complained about not having source in the old post he points to was open sourced before Google bought them. So, evidently, it wouldn't have stopped Google.
Wait, but the thing that you wouldn't use 916 days ago was released as open source a while ago. How is your "I won't use your products because they are just binary blobs and I demand source" vindicated by Google acquiring Pixate after that?
I never noticed it was open sourced a while ago. I guess they never emailed their KS backers, or something. I raised my objections to the founders after backing their Kickstarter, and then never bothered using their software after that because I wasn't confident in the long-term survival of it.
Today is literally the first time I've ever heard that this project was open sourced.
Congratulations to the Pixate team!