
How Twitter Came to Boston - smit
http://bostinno.com/2013/03/04/how-twitter-came-to-boston-the-story-behind-two-very-different-acquisitions/#ss__304596_1_0__ss
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josh2600
I have to view the BlueFin labs acquisition as the hallmark of days to come.
"build apps on our data!" cried the spider to the fly. It's all becoming
maddeningly predictable.

1) build a platform

2) get devs to use your platforms data

3) capriciously threaten to cut off access to drive a sale.

There's something basically malicious about building businesses like this.
Companies used to pay for innovation, now they're able to simply choke it out.

The key in getting a big acquisition is multiple suitors. If you've only got
one company chasing you, you are at their mercy. It's an unenviable position.

~~~
smit
Yes its a very tricky place to be in. Building a business on a single platform
is so dangerous these days. I had a friend who tried to build on facebook
platform and had to shut down because of their rules and threats.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Obligatory:
[https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePl...](https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace)

 _What it comes down to is this: if you want to develop software, you can
build for the Web and/or Unix and/or OSS platforms; or alternatively, you can
be a sharecropper._

------
pifflesnort
I had no bewilderment as to why Crashlytics sold. What bewildered me -- and
apparently the author of the article as well -- is _why on earth_ Twitter
bought them.

It's essentially a commodity product, with multiple competing implementations,
open-source offerings across the board, and is something that can be built (I
know this because it _has_ been built -- _repeatedly_ ) on a scale of months.

If Twitter seriously paid $100M for that, I think whoever is leading up M&A
might be completely disconnected from technological reality.

