

Congratulations, Appjets - pg
http://ycombinator.posterous.com/congratulations-appjets

======
alanthonyc
_"The reason they decided to go with Google was that they were literally
overwhelmed by Wave: after meeting the Wave guys, they were so impressed that
they (a) wanted to work on Wave themselves, and (b) didn't want to compete
with it. "_

This sounds pretty cool to me.

~~~
blasdel
To me it looks like they're burning down a simple product people love -- to go
work on a bloated product people are at best ambivalent about.

Sure, they could end up bringing their spark to Wave and making it into
something that all the Etherpad users will love even more, but what do you
think the odds of that are? Why kill Etherpad before that happens?

~~~
pg
To me it sounds like you're so eager to complain that you're jumping to
conclusions in order to complain about them. Why don't you just wait and see
what happens?

~~~
blasdel
You know me so well :)

I really do hope they're successful in taming Wave's UI complexity and making
it actually useful for writing documents collaboratively. Right now Wave is
geared towards adding commentary (which it does well), but that isn't very
useful if you don't already have a mostly-complete document to mark up. Even
with just one editor Wave can be really obnoxious if you try to write
something more than a paragraph in one blurb -- it could really use an
Etherpad mode!

As someone who's bet on Appjet before, what odds would you give of them
pulling that off at Google? By tearing down Etherpad, they've clearly gone all
in, but there's a substantial team on multiple continents working on Wave, and
they're already set in some rather weird ways that the Appjet guys would have
to reform significantly.

Do you understand how their users would be at least apprehensive about this? I
should have bought a private copy when I had the chance...

I do have faith that they'll make a splash on the Wave team, but I doubt that
they'll be able to fix Wave so that it's a good Etherpad replacement in the
next three months.

~~~
bumblebird
Personally the best case I can see for wave is that some of the features get
absorbed into GMail. I can't see it succeeding on its own.

(I just tried it out for the first time). Horrible bloated slow UI, hideous
scrollbars, and pretty underwhelming.

It didn't seem to solve any problems I had.

So thinking about real useful features people want, how about they add a
'collaborate on email' mode in gmail, where you can write etherpad style email
drafts with other people and when you're all happy, click send. I'd rather
they work on things people want like that.

------
mattmaroon
Way to represent the S07 there Aaron and David. Grats!

------
pmjordan
I know it's only a fairly irrelevant detail in the post, but this resonated
strongly with me:

 _PHP. But that, unfortunately, they just couldn't stand working on. The PHP
days were probably the lowest point, judging by how bedraggled they seemed._

~~~
strlen
I am curious, wasn't AppJet JVM based (using Rhino for Javascript)? Why
couldn't they offer support for Ruby via JRuby? Would have been a language
that's _both_ much more pleasant to work than PHP and has great traction with
web developer community. Was there a switch away from JVM/Rhino to a C/V8
based solution?

~~~
pmjordan
I hope you don't expect me to have that information, although it's reasonable
to assume that if their first attempt was purely javascript based, that they
had a certain intellectual investment into the language. I'm not sure what
would have been gained by switching to Ruby. PHP is problematic in many ways,
not only language but also runtime and lack of asynchronous I/O.

~~~
strlen
Didn't expect you to have that information, was just more general posturing. I
complete agree with you on PHP.

Ruby would have been useful in that it runs _very well_ on the JVM (their
product runs Javascript in a JVM container), but is pretty popular amongst web
developers (you could also argue, with the _right_ kind of web developers; PHP
developers prefer to just use shared hosting in any case).

------
ruslan
This is totally ridiculous: build something to throw it away and get job at
Google ? Blah. This does not have anything in common neither with business nor
with entrepreneurship.

~~~
strlen
I think a good chunk of people here aren't looking to build a conventional
business. Most are looking to (firstly) hack on something they find
interesting and if the constellations are aligned right, make enough in an
exit to be able to freely choose where/when they work (given "liquidity
preferences", the latter would also imply "generate a non-trivial return for
their investors", which ends up being used to back other ventures).

I'd imagine this gives them:

a) far more leverage to choose their projects at Google (if you're entering
Google in a conventional way, you aren't even told what projects/team you will
be working until your start date: you could interview hoping to work on
search, but end up working on internal/IT applications)

b) enough money, so that after their stock vests at Google they'd wouldn't
_have to_ work.

You are right, however, that is very different from traditional
entrepreneurship or business.

------
gcheong
So could this acquisition be characterized as more of an HR one than a
technological one?

~~~
pgbovine
well it seems like their technology is extremely valuable as well, since from
what i've been reading on HN, they blow the socks off all would-be competitors

~~~
blasdel
_blew_ , past-tense. They killed their public product today, the funeral's in
three months.

~~~
ashu
damnit, upvoted by mistake. apologies.

------
staunch
Sounds like the absolutely "ideal" YC story. Stick with it. Iterate. Beat 'em
with technology.

------
milestinsley
Congratulations to them!

It's exciting that they were so impressed with Wave. It's easy to overlook the
potential of Wave in its current incarnation, but this, to me, suggests there
is some seriously awesome stuff coming to the Wave platform.

These guys created Etherpad, and _they_ are excited by Wave... ergo, so am I!

~~~
bumblebird
Given enough money, I would be excited by drying paint.

I'd take it all with a pinch of salt personally.

