What Happened at NewsGator (opens in new tab)

(inessential.com)

178 pointsswilliams11y ago13 comments

13 comments

The writing here is very nice. I wish my writing carried itself as well. Beyond the style and structure, the tone of the article is remarkable and lovely. Cynicism wrapped in love and hope and nostalgia.

Nice work.

brudgers11y ago

The writing is good because the author fearlessly and shamelessly wrote a story about himself. The narrative is "man goes on a journey."[1] Imagine if he had tried to distance himself from events or cast himself as the cause. He allows the story to reflect real life and the reader to feel the ups and downs and apathy of the workplace from.our own experience. [2]

[1] The other story is "a stranger comes to town."

[2] This but with a bit more amplitude than perhaps is found in our lives. http://sivers.org/drama

cookiecaper11y ago

It's nice to read a piece by someone who doesn't have a chip on his shoulder. So many times people leave employment bitter after a losing a hard-fought and divisive political battle. It says a lot about the author's character that he can calmly empathize with all of his colleagues, even through what were surely highly controversial and sensitive choices, like the decision to sell the author's application to a competitor.

willu11y ago

"In late 2005 it acquired NetNewsWire and hired me." "I shipped NetNewsWire Lite 4.0 on the Mac App Store, and a couple months later sold NetNewsWire to Black Pixel..."

How do you sell a product after it has been acquired by another company? Did he somehow retain independent ownership of the Lite version?

ensignavenger11y ago

It appears the article has been fixed to say "Newsgator sold..."

pbreit11y ago

How much do things like this get sold for? Dollars or equity? 5, 6, 7 or 8 figures?

prosim11y ago

It's a good article.

I would love to read more background on the acquisitions of MarsEdit, NNW, and Glassboard. MarsEdit 3.0 was released in 2010 and since then has only seen minor updates. NNW is dead in the water on OS X and completely gone on iOS. And Glassboard is losing significant amounts of money while the author spends more time on blog posts and podcasts than adding features to the app (not to talk about all those crashes).

jessxkcd11y ago

Wonderfully written post. Reminds me of Dylan's: "The times they are a-changin'". The tech industry seems to be extremely dynamic.

linuxydave11y ago

"In addition to straight RSS reading it had some kind of controls for making groups of people. An admin could say, for instance, that all developers are subscribed to these ten feeds, plus whatever else they might want."

I had a similar idea a few years ago but didn't think there was a market for it. RSS feeds don't use up a lot of bandwidth so you couldn't use that angle (even in a country like South Africa, where I lived at the time, where bandwidth was limited and expensive). I also couldn't picture a company wanting to spend money on something as non-critical as RSS feeds. I wonder how wrong I was?

breischl11y ago

I don't think there's ever been much market for RSS as such, because RSS is just a means to an end. Companies, particularly big ones, are constantly trying to improve internal communications. Think HR newsletters, IT updates (we're upgrading to Windows XP! [hey, they're enterprises]), the CEO's newsletter, version 27 of internal tool Foo is being released and what it means to you, whatever. They want better internal communications and it looked like RSS could help, so they bought it.

NewsGator (now Sitrion) still does this with Social Sites, they just do it as a Facebook-ish newsfeed rather than as an RSS reader. Same goal, different implementation.

bithush11y ago

I remember when NewsGator bought FeedDemon, my RSS reader of choice on Windows. I was a little nervous but it went ok, for a while anyway. FeedDemon came to end-of-like quite naturally I feel. RSS just sort of died off for me the same way I think it did for many others. I think the problem with RSS is the information overload and addiction to more information. It just all gets too much once you hit a certain number of feeds. Now I don't use RSS for anything, at least not knowingly.

infofarmer11y ago

«And then I went straight to work — February 1, 2013 — at Q Branch, where I plan to be for the rest of my career.»

Interesting resolution.

camillomiller11y ago

I hoped for an insight on what BlackPixel is doing with NetNewsWire. Still no good sync options whatsoever... Still no sync-enabled iOS apps...

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