Nice to see Adobe adapting to the slow passing of Flash with interesting tools for the new generation of mobile developers and their problems (device/os fragmentation).
Although I agree with your statement, this project has very little to do with Flash. If anything at all. I would imagine Adobe would have considered such a project regardless of the future of Flash.
I don't understand why they didn't try to fight this based on the NDA or no-use. Wouldn't a good lawyer be willing to take this on retainer, if they could prove their tech was being ripped off despite the legal protections they signed going into the deal?
I'm having trouble following... how were they ripped off?
There's some confusion about the NDA, but as far as I can see... The Company didn't disclose to anyone.
It broke down in due diligence which could just mean that The Company looked at their financials, and found that they were a lot weaker than first presumed and thus not a good acquisition. I'm not sure they admitted that they weren't profitable (who does really?), so it might have been presumed that if you have X products, and Y infrastructure then you must have Z sales behind it. When they looked at the financials, they didn't see the sales figure they wanted so bailed.
NDA's are normally written not only to prevent disclosure, but also to prevent the company receiving the information from using it to copy your product. If you're disclosing to a potential competitor, you don't want them sharing that information with anyone else, but you especially don't want them just stealing your codebase and using it themselves.
I went through this very same left-at-the-altar scenario a decade ago with a startup. It can be very difficult to prove that the company used the NDA information they had in their possession. Clearly the tech staff in the big company saw it, since this seems to be how they made the determination that they could do it in-house for less.
As part of due diligence, they want to know what the secret recipe is. After all, you'd hate to find out one of the special herbs and spices is cocaine or arsenic. This is fine because MegaCorp signed an NDA.
MegaCorp breaks off the deal. Their chefs decide that they can make their own chicken. After all it's not hard to combine these nine herbs and spices.
The chefs only have this knowledge because you revealed your trade secrets under the protection of an NDA. They're not white box reverse engineering the recipe.
I think what Fred is saying is that in the wake of SOPA's failure, the entertainment industry might be willing to come to the table with tech and work to ban the worst offenders, rather than pushing for the kind of overarching, draconian laws that the public rejects.
Then he is stupid or misinformed. It should be well know by now that RIAAs tactics are always to attack and then, when stopped, offer to start 'negotiating'.
It is essentially roll the die: even and they win big, odd and they win, just a little less. We always lose. Don't get sucked into playing that game.
Exactly. This kind of thinking that "we all know that site is bad" happened to Dajaz1, too, and yet the Court disagreed. Imagine the potential for abuse for such "we all know who's a pirate" cases.
Plus, we still haven't figured out how bad piracy really is and what it means for humanity. I refuse to support anymore copyright enforcement laws, until we overhaul copyright laws first, and we adapt them to the 21st century. Not a single new copyright law until we reform what we already have and repeal some of the abusive ones, like the last few copyright extensions, amend the DMCA against abusers to pay higher damages, and so on.
You don't think its reasonable to pursue cases against sites like MegaUpload, where clear evidence can be established that they uploaded copyrighted content with the intent to profit?
Doesn't it protect community sites like Tumblr and Reddit to carve out a clear definition of who an offender is?
Isn't this just how the sausage is made? It is interesting that Timeline actually makes it easier to disrupt the flow of personal information and privilege ads over friends. But this is how the marketing department of any big company would see it. Can't IPO without getting your hands dirty.
Why not? As far as I know, it's been at least somewhat successful in some other fields already. The other surprising thing is how different the sites can be while still having the same structure and UI.
I think StackExchange is sufficiently flexible to be useful to people who aren't programmers--it just needs time to branch out. Remember that StackOverflow was not only the first site, but also had a big head start in the form of Spolsky and Atwood's blog audiences. Growing a different, non-programmer audience organically is naturally going to take some effort and time.
So we should be teaching those new to this, that it's ok to stop and say 'this is hard, i need perspective'. This is not helped by the cult of the founder that is lauded: the strong-willed and headstrong leader who has 100% confidence in her abilities.
Let's take an example - Etsy has grown to 80 engineers in the last year. If 50 of these workers had decided they wanted to go their own way and create a startup, how many jobs would have been created and how many of those people would be out of work?
Easy money at the seed stage means a lot of companies that are small ideas trying their hand at building a business.
I think the Vonnegut reference is an apt one. But there is also a simpler question at hand. When we romanticize startups, do we actually undermine the larger, perhaps less interesting companies who are better at generating employment and economic growth.
In the same way that the American dream of home ownership came back to bite us, perhaps the cult of entrepreneurship could use a hard look.
You don't increase wealth by being inefficient. The cult of startups leads to more startups, but it doesn't make them more successful.
There are some exceptions, but the market can always be irrational for a little while. LinkedIn and GroupOn aren't real businesses and eventually the stock price will reflect this. However, in the short run they are able to pump the stock price by having a microscopic float and getting listed on things like Russel 2000.
Oracle, Cisco, Intel, HP are all startups, they are just very old and established. They employ tons of people. They aren't doing us any favors if they barely survive, however. Inefficiency makes us all poorer, even if in the shortrun it makes some people better off because of a paycheck (HP employee for example).
