[ibejoeb]

Oh man, two things: first, I wonder what DropBox will do with PiCloud, and second, I feel like a dodged a bullet. I kinda hate saying that, since it always turns up on these threads, but it's just true.

I had been working seriously on converting a financial application to run on PiCloud. It's mid-November. In the hundred days until they cease operations, I would have had to deal with 10-K filings for my clients and scramble to get the hell out of there, just in time for Q1. What an absolute mess that would have been.

No other time would have been much better, and I know there's an API compatible replacement in the works, but I've been there, and I'm sure something would have freaked out.

Whatever happened to having some kind of reasonable transition period where the buyer continues to support all of its clients? PiCloud, your product was really neat. DropBox, I really wish you wouldn't just hit it and quit it.

[cschmidt]

I think it is pretty clear from the wording it is an aqi-hire by DropBox. They are just getting a talented team.

I am very close to launching Predictobot.com, which uses PiCloud for all of its computation. I spent last week moving to Heroku after DotCloud's pivot, and now I'll need to replace PiCloud. The web sure is a stable place.

[ChuckMcM]

"The web sure is a stable place."

This is an interesting variation on this round's "boomlet". So in the previous dot.com boom there were lots of companies who didn't have revenue so they appeared, until the cash ran out and then fell back to earth. Now we can start a company with much less money, but they go poof in an aquihire when things go squishy.

So was it a pricing issue? or a customer acquisition issue? How is it that so many of these companies get into this squeeze? Is it a chicken -/- egg thing where you can't price it to be self sustaining until you get critical mass? Or is it that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are just sucking all the oxygen out of this space?

[BerislavLopac]

Which brings up another observation: when starting a business, sure take advantage of all those practical and inexpensive tools that can help you build your product in record time. But as soon as you start getting some serious traction and money (income or investment), don't hesitate to replace them with something you have more control over. Hm, it would be interesting to see open-source, self-hosted equivalents of useful services like PiCloud and the like.