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by metachor 5854 days ago
The lesson I took away from Panic's Audion story is that they got gridlocked while trying to play two potential buyers (AOL and Apple), and Apple ended up moving forward with a less encumbered competitor. Please correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds like Panic wanted to get eaten by an 800lb. gorilla.
2 comments
raganwald 5854 days ago
Oh? I think they wanted to get rich, but not to sell out:

In fact, I'd say that almost 5 minutes after the meeting Steve and I knew in our hearts that it wasn't time — that we didn't want to join Apple (yet). We maybe went through the motions of "deciding" on the flight back home, but I think we knew the truth. And the truth went something like this:

"This is our only chance to do Panic. We don't have kids, we're not married, we don't have huge obligations. We didn't invest our life savings into it, just a few hundred dollars. We don't even have life savings. We probably won't get this opportunity again in our lifetime — the full chance to take a complete risk, to experiment, quit our day jobs, start a business that certainly may fail, put our hearts into the soul of it, and try to make it fly — making the best possible Macintosh software we can without the threat of mortgages or the cost of braces or kids wondering why we're never home. And while there may be a time in our life where we crave some stability, or there may be a time in our life when things don't work out with Panic and we return to be a player in a larger, awesome team like Apple, that time is certainly not now. Panic's time is."

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raganwald 5854 days ago
post scriptum: Whether Panic wanted to sell or not, the fact remains that building on a proprietary platform is perilous. Some people may still want to do so, but this is analogous to pointing out that BASE jumping is thrilling and deeply satisfying.

We can agree that Panic did consider a sale to AOL and Apple without taking anything away from the fact that a content-neutral proprietary platform still carries the risk that you will wake up one morning to discover that the vendor is giving away competition.

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