[blihp]

The talent and ideas that were Pixelmator will be substantially diffused as it's absorbed by Apple... most of what you liked about Pixelmator is likely no more over the next year or two. Depending on Apple's reasoning for the acquisition (i.e. how much of it was just for the talent vs the product) you'll may see some small glimpses of Pixelmator's influence a couple years from now in Apple's stuff. Most of the time Apple doesn't keep the acquired product around.

[Eric_WVGG]

On acquisitions like DarkSky (RIP), sure. This looks a lot more like a Logic-style acquisition.

Pixelmator would slot nicely into the same consumer set of productivity apps that ship with all Macs (Pages, Numbers, Keynote). Photomator will get them back into the market they abandoned when Aperture was shuttered.

Speaking of Aperture… am I the only person who remembers that Apple owns Claris? Why didn't Apple just hand off Aperture to Claris and say "just keep this thing working on new MacOS releases"?

[iwontberude]

And the management team that brought us ClarisWorks is still leading Apps to this day. Apple doesn't wipe out management during acquisitions, it permanently entrenches them in their structure.

[grahamj]

ugh don't get me started about Aperture. I'm still salty about that.

[sersi]

I still haven't found an app that's as good as Aperture used to be with my workflow in term of UX/convenience etc...

Never understood the logic of getting rid of it. I know a few people who actually switched to mac because of Aperture

[kergonath]

> I still haven't found an app that's as good as Aperture used to be with my workflow in term of UX/convenience etc...

Me neither… I wanted to like Lightroom, which was the solution most of the community seemed to migrate to, but between the infuriating inconsistent UI and the predatory subscription model I did not use it for long. And now I have a Rube Goldberg thing that is janky and feels brittle.

[grahamj]

Yep same here, tried it for a while but Adobe's idea of UI just does not work for me.

I reluctantly went to Photos, mainly because of ease of use on the phone for family members, but still I miss full tagging and smart album support.

[kergonath]

> I miss full tagging and smart album support

Yes! And plugins are great, but the experience is not smooth, and quickly annoying when working with many photos. Also, switching libraries is not good. I wish it were more integrated because on paper, a photo management app combining the features of Affinity, DxO, and others sounds fantastic.

[SllX]

Claris isn’t really a dumping ground anymore. That’s how it started, but they’ve evolved their own business since then.

[jstummbillig]

Logic and and Final Cut were bought and developed since. Pixelmator fills the open Photoshop space in an Apple way, and will plausibly go the same way — no vague pessimism required.

[jmb99]

The (almost) direct counter example is Aperture. That was the “Pro” photo application and it was killed for seemingly no reason with no notice. It’s fairly reasonable to be pessimistic about this acquisition given that history.

[troupo]

Logic and FinalCut are from the time when Apple cared about software and especially pro software.

In the past decade these apps even disappeared from their main menu on Apple.com where they used to have a prominent spot.

Can you point to a newer acquisition of great software that is still being developed?

[mrzool]

I really, really hope you’re right about that.

[askafriend]

Pixelmator as a product is literally what Apple would have built anyway if they made an attempt.

The difference here is how aligned the original team is with their acquirer...down to the corner radius on every button.

With other products like Dark Sky, the product is substantially different in philosophy or design.

[wlesieutre]

The main worry is that it will be an acquihire into the Photos app and Apple doesn’t actually want to have a separate image editor (let alone two).

They used to have Aperture competing with Lightroom and then decided pro photography wasn’t a space they needed to be in, has something changed where now they want their own Photoshop competitor?

[zarzavat]

This would be very short sighted as Pixelmator adds way more value to the Mac platform than a better Photos app.

[wlesieutre]

Dark Sky would've added more value if they'd just renamed it Weather and made it the built-in app, and yet...

I do hope they'll offer Pixelmator as an included app on Macs and Pixelmator Pro alongside Logic, Finalcut, and other "Pro" software. The lack of a built-in image editor can be annoying.

Photos works for some stuff, Preview includes basic adjustments too, but sometimes you just want something like a hue/saturation adjustment instead of color temperature and pink/green tint, or multiple layers so you can experiment with different edits non-destructively.

[stu2b50]

Eh, I don’t think it’s the same thing. The gulf between “photos user” and “pixelmator” user is quite high, much more so than “weather app” and “weather app but better”.

In particular, if you have the average user Pixelmator, they’d be worse off. The same isn’t really true with weather or darksky - they really just do the same thing.

We still have iMovie and FinalCut, GarageBand and Logic. Apple has kept two different product lines before.

[grvbck]

Also remember that some of those have been crippled in the past. iMovie used to be way more advanced. Older versions of Pages had (pretty basic but still) layout options that were completely removed.

It's also not impossible that Apple moves a few of Pixelmator's tools into Photos but kills the rest of it, either actively or just by stagnant development.

[PittleyDunkin]

> This would be very short sighted as Pixelmator adds way more value to the Mac platform than a better Photos app.

This is comparing apples to oranges. A better photos app isn't even remotely comparable to shipping a raster image editor. One is concerned with overall rendering of the products of a camera, the other is concerned with precise editing of a raster image.

[zarzavat]

Apple sells Macs. The Mac platform is enhanced by the existence of Pixelmator as an exclusive app.

If Pixelmator were to disappear then the value of the Mac platform would decrease. There is nothing that the Pixelmator team could do to the Photos app to make up for that.

[PittleyDunkin]

> The main worry is that it will be an acquihire into the Photos app

There doesn't appear to be much overlap in terms of functionality.

Hell, if this is true I'd actively celebrate it.

[PittleyDunkin]

> Pixelmator as a product is literally what Apple would have built anyway if they made an attempt.

Even accepting this premise there's little reason to think Apple would have cared about this particular market before they bought Pixelmator. Why would you think Apple would target a given market segment?

[jbverschoor]

There’s no way Apple can build this. Their human interface people all seem to be gone on the desktop. So many things work so bad these days when they migrated to the new ui framework.

[askafriend]

Logic Pro for Mac is regarded very well.

When they make a focused effort in professional software, Apple can deliver.

[DidYaWipe]

At the time Apple bought eMagic, Logic's UI sucked. It actually had dialogs that told you to "reboot the dialog for changes to take effect."

Given how well-regarded Logic is today, it must be drastically improved. I haven't looked at it lately, but am considering the bundle with Motion and FCP.

One piece of software Apple built in-house is Motion. While it suffers from a few UI gaffes, it was an innovative product that still has no competitor in the motion-graphics space.

[mxey]

Workflow becoming Shortcuts mostly as-is would be a counterexample.

[iwontberude]

I want to point out that the same management team that brought us ClarisWorks is still leading Apps. Apple drag and drops teams into their org chart and gives them tons of autonomy.

[PittleyDunkin]

> The talent and ideas that were Pixelmator will be substantially diffused as it's absorbed by Apple...

The "ideas" in pixelmator are mostly updating traditional image-mutation patterns to match the native environment language. Let's not pretend that this was some kind of revolutionary application for image development.

Is it implemented well? Absolutely. But this is hardly an example of developing new software practices or processes.

[whamlastxmas]

I don’t understand why companies buy other companies for the talent and not product. Why not just make everyone working there an incredible offer at the same time? It would cost so so so much less than these massive buy outs. Maybe not all of them would take you up on it, but if you buy the company a lot of them may not stick around post-buyout anyway. I feel like this would be a lot more effective also because in a buyout, employees just make the same old salary at the new company. In my method, they make a ton more and are more likely to stay

[jahewson]

> Why not just make everyone working there an incredible offer at the same time?

Under civil law this is regarded as tortious interference. Businesses have a contract with their employees and if you interfere with it to harm the employer then you are liable for damages.

If you tried to make a mass offer like this, the employer could likely get a judge to place an injunction against it immediately.

If they don’t notice until further down the line, watch out: damages are unlimited. They can extend to a judge breaking up your new business unit and handing it back to the original employer or rewarding damages of the entire lifetime value of the business unit.

That’s why you never see companies do this :)

[93po]

it's ridiculous how america is all about free markets except for the instances where rich people could lose money, then suddenly free markets are bad and evil

[dahart]

Which rich people are you talking about, the buyer or the seller? Presumably the buyer of a startup is richer than the startup founders. If poaching all the employees of a company was legal, then we’d end up with only monopolies by the largest and richest, and it would be legal for big companies to crush smaller competition. The playing field in the U.S. and everywhere globally is definitely biased toward the rich, but you’re inadvertently arguing for even greater concentration of wealth, it doesn’t seem like this argument is well thought out.

[cultureswitch]

I wonder what's the theory of harm behind such law. Employers competing over talent is... illegal? Explains a lot actually.

[SupremumLimit]

Step 1: make everyone an incredible offer Step 2: get them all hired away from your competitor who is now out of business Step 3: in a year or two, restructure all these people out (or just fire them if your jurisdiction allows) Step 4: your competitor is gone, and all it cost was a year or two of salaries.

Seems like a great way to help out budding monopolies.

[93po]

it seems like you can just prevent this by providing incentives for your employees to not get poached, and also companies that mass-hire-mass-fire would get reputations for doing so, and people wouldn't fall for it. making it illegal instead of requiring businesses to actually pay for retention and loyalty in a free market way is so silly

[1123581321]

When a mass employment offer is made to steal or destroy another business, it's usually something ridiculous. For developers it might be a million a year each, for example. It's not an amount intended to be paid perpetually so it can be larger than the defending business can be paying to retain.

It is not illegal to do general hiring at good rates and shop for employees at a particular company. That wouldn't have the same results as buying a company. Plus, you wouldn't own their creations; you'd have to rebuild or clean room steal it.

[Applejinx]

The 'people wouldn't fall for it' is in error. People aren't rational actors and don't have complete information. That's a bold statement, I know, but it's at least as correct as 'people wouldn't fall for it'. I'm pretty sure it's easy to make a case for 'too many people will fall for it'.

[dahart]

You’re assuming that a startup has more money than a larger company. Why?

And since when has a company’s reputation stopped them from doing business?

[dahart]

Multiple reasons. That it does happen should be reason to question your assumptions, rather than assume some obvious imagined alternative has been overlooked by everyone, right?

While poaching one employee at a time might be usually legal, attempting to poach all employees of a company might not be legal, and either way is considered unethical.

Paying off the investors may be the goal.

Eliminating the product or competition ethically may be the goal.

Buying the competition’s customers, and/or distribution channels may be the goal.

Acquiring the top talent, while giving them the expected reward for having bootstrapped a company, might be the goal. Founders are often uninterested in a salaried position for themselves, but may be interested in a return for the company and payoff for everyone in it - as backpay for their investment, completely separate from their salary going forward.

Also, your hypothesis is not accurate. Buyouts are not always, or even usually, massive. It’s common for them to be small and medium sized. It is definitely not a given that making persuasive individual offers would be any cheaper than an acquisition, let alone “so much” cheaper. Depends entirely on the situation.

[tiahura]

Unethical by whom? The now richer employees? Or the salty cheapskate?

[dahart]

Investors and founders to name two. Taking over a company via mass poaching would absolutely invite lawsuits.

The government for another. Hiring all the employees of another company is regulated, and it could be seen as anti-competitive behavior.

You’re thinking of individual poaching, not whole company poaching.

[tiahura]

I'll admit, as an attorney, this isn't my specialty, and every jurisdiction varies, but the ye olde common law of tortuous interference requires something more than mere competition, this is America, not the EU.

2 DAN B. DOBBS, THE LAW OF TORTS §§ 448-52 (2001)("you are thus free to induce my customers, employees, or suppliers to deal with you instead of me, as long [as] they are not bound to me by contract").

Restatement (Second) of Torts § 768 (1979) (stating that interference with a competitor’s contractual relations is permissible if it does not employ wrongful means and is intended to advance the competing interest).

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Sturges, 52 S.W.3d 711, 726 (Tex. 2001) (" we conclude that to establish liability for interference with a prospective contractual or business relation the plaintiff must prove that it was harmed by the defendant's conduct that was either independently tortious or unlawful. By "independently tortious" we mean conduct that would violate some other recognized tort duty.").

[dahart]

Correct, tortious interference has criteria, and making competing employment offers doesn’t necessarily or automatically meet those criteria, but it could if there are other factors involved. Again, it depends on the situation.

You’ve asked two different questions. One about legality and the other about public perception. There are lots of things that are legal and still considered unethical. And there are lots of things that might or might not be legal, that businesses avoid simply because there’s legal risk, and/or avoid because there’s risk of negative perception.

If everyone involved in a startup agreed to be individually hired, and divest interest in the startup, and there was mutual understanding on all sides, then there may be reasonable chances of success and no lawsuits. I think that probably has happened before. If not everyone agreed to it, and a company tried to acquihire all the individuals of a company forcefully without agreement by the investors and founders, there’s a high likelihood (risk) of legal conflict, and the likelihood will increase under US law if the acquiring company would start to look anything like a monopoly on the market in question after the unofficial “merger”, right?

[93po]

Agree with the other person - there's nothing unethical about hiring people in right-to-work laws and systems however you like. employers can fire at any time with no reason, the reverse also has to be true that they can hire at any time with no reason

buyouts are often massive considering the alternative, which is the cost of recruiting and possibly inflated salaries for the people you recruit, which frankly happens often in buyouts anyway

[dahart]

Like the other person, you’re arguing about individual hires, and not considering the implications of whole-company mass poaching.

Sure some buyouts are big. But plenty are small. Most aren’t “massive”. The histogram, I speculate, is probably something like the Zipf distribution: the frequency of buyouts of a given size is probably inversely proportional to the size, to a first approximation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

[alexwhb]

Ya that’s a solid point. Though many startups give their employees equity options… so you have to factor that in too. Also buying a start up for talent seems risky since many people that join startups are looking for a totally different energy than a large corporation, so it seems reasonable that there’d be a big drop off of that talent as soon as it gets acquired… especially if the vision is not aligned

[dwaite]

Sometimes that does happen.

Apple historically tends to look for shipping results, and the underlying software and services (such as using DarkSky's algorithms and server code as starting points) are often worth it over just putting offers out to key people.

This obviously isn't always true; they do have some longer-term research projects and strategic initiatives we've seen leak out (cars and non-invasive blood glucose monitoring are common mentioned ones), but I think Apple generally would prefer to let others succeed or fail in the research.

There's nothing _to_ Pixelmator IMHO other than the product. Apple knows how to do sepia tone filters already.

[yoz-y]

Apple did do that when they were building an electric car: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/apple-s-auto-ambiti...

[jahewson]

No, this was a failing business and the employees fled.

[39896880]

Note that this hasn’t happened with Shazam, miraculously

[Insanity]

Ok so to be fair.. I own an iPhone for about 3 years now and only discovered it comes shipped with Shazam about 6 months ago and only used it twice since. When I told my wife (also a somewhat long-time iPhone user), she didn’t know it came build-in either.

I’m not a power user, neither is my wife.. I don’t think it is all that well advertised.

[39896880]

Shazam was bought to boost Siri’s ability to recognize music but Siri isn’t really good at much, so it hasn’t been fully absorbed. Now with AI eating the world I assume that functionality will get reproduced by a foundation model and actually integrated into the OS

[1123581321]

That's interesting. Is Shazam a default control center button for new phones? I don't remember how mine got there. (There's still probably a discovery issue with those buttons as they're just icons.)

[brokencode]

Really? Even though the company is in Lithuania? It seems like they’d probably keep on working on Pixelmator or something closely related since any other teams would be a long way away.