
Motorola Shutting Down 280 Slides - aaronbrethorst
http://280slides.com/
======
droithomme
I don't know how the developers are feeling, but years ago I was in a similar
situation a couple different times. Poured my heart and soul into excellent
best in class design and then had it all yanked out and dumped in a vat of
acid. Years of my work, of my life, was gone and squandered and there was
absolutely nothing I could do about it. The couple thousand hours of unpaid
overtime was just insult on top of injury. The last time it happened was from
a decision by clueless MBAs after a hostile talent acquisition by a Fortune
500 outfit. The talent doesn't always stick around after that sort of
shafting. It's like someone has murdered your baby and then wants to to stick
around and help them move furniture across town. No thanks.

One of the best arguments for open source is your work can't be trashed and
dismissed by financiers and people with business degrees who have no taste and
no idea how to create anything. The one thing that redeemed HP in its recent
move to trash WebOS was the decision to open source it. Without that, many of
the best engineers on the project would have ended up leaving the company in
disgust.

~~~
badclient
If by developers you mean the founders, I'd reckon they are feeling pretty
good all said and done.

It's common knowledge that a vast majority of acquisitions fail and end up
shutting down post acq. So while I can understand your frustration for your
_unpaid_ work, it can be assumed that these guys were _very well_ paid. It
makes it less similar to your situation.

~~~
droithomme
I apologize for confusing things by bringing up too many issues at once. In
particular, I did briefly mention pay, it was meant to be a brief aside, and
should not have because it's irrelevant to the point as it pertains to money.
Obviously I was paid a lot, but on salary one does not receive overtime pay
for extra hours. Extra hours are thus a free will donation to the project. The
idea I was trying to express, but failed to do well was that, if I knew in
advance my work would be annihilated, I would never have bothered caring too
much about it or staying past 5 to meet an important deadline or working all
weekend on a bug fix.

It's not about money. It's about having one's powerful creative work destroyed
by imbeciles.

I have 630,000 hours alive before I will die from birth to death. About
200,000 of them remain. The clock is ticking right now. Each hour that passes
is lost and will never ever be recovered. The time of talented individuals is
best spent contributing, not pissing their talent away in futility.

I did not make the same mistake of youth I describe above ever again. Since
then I have always retained control and/or ownership of my work. I gently
advise others to consider doing the same.

The purpose of my post was to express sympathy and empathy with their
tremendous loss, not disdain for not being rich enough. I am already rich
enough, what I can't get more of is hours remaining.

~~~
wladimir
_I have 630,000 hours alive before I will die from birth to death. About
200,000 of them remain. The clock is ticking right now. Each hour that passes
is lost and will never ever be recovered. The time of talented individuals is
best spent contributing, not pissing their talent away in futility_

I wish I could give you 10 upvotes for this. Time and passion is _not_
equivalent, not even freely interchangeable, with money.

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pchristensen
My comment from the day the acquisition was announced:

"pg, please, please get the people building awesome tools to become
ridiculously profitable like Wufoo! I so wanted to use 280 North but I was
scared they would get bought and vanish. My fear came true. EDIT: Half true.
No word yet on what Motorola is going to do with them. Congrats to the 280
Norths, YC, and their other investors. Let's all join hands and pray that
Motorola allows development on Cappuccino et al to remain public."

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631036>

~~~
boucher
And Cappuccino development does continue out in the open. There's no risk of
the project dying because of anything Motorola could do to it.

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jcromartie
I never really thought of 280 Slides as a "real" app anyway. It always just
felt like a demo for Cappuccino.

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thaumaturgy
One more nail in the coffin for recommending web-based services.

~~~
robryan
It does feel to me that joining YC and then taking a significant funding round
afterwards is producing a lot of auditions where either the product is
outright shut down or only parts are kept.

Sure looking from a higher level these may push forward innovation. Just makes
it harder for us early adopters to justify investing time in using their
apps/services.

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NHQ
Which Motorolla? Google's, or Motorolla's? [context question]

~~~
sirn
Since it is Motorola _Mobility_ , shouldn't that be Google's[1]?

[1]: [http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/17/2570039/motorola-
mobility...](http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/17/2570039/motorola-mobility-
stockholders-approve-google-buyout)

~~~
rboyce
Until the merger is complete, it's very important that Google and Motorola
Mobility continue to behave as independent companies. Since this deal is under
scrutiny by the FTC, I doubt that Google would put their acquisition at risk
over a project as small as 280 Slides.

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ben1040
Is 280 Atlas also dead? It seems like there hasn't been any movement on the
public beta in 9 months.

~~~
1qaz2wsx3edc
"761st day of the Atlas Beta."

Hahaha

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wwweston
Anybody know why?

Not enough users?

Folding the product into something else?

Having something as awesome as Cappuccino and a flagship app like 280 slides
runs counter to the Google thesis that JavaScript isn't good enough? ;)

~~~
sek
There was never a real market for it, Power Point and Google Presentation
fills the need of most users i think.

To say that about Google is a little unfair, you can't argue they didn't try.
Cappuccino is not that new any more and everyone is doing native apps right
now.

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RandallBrown
I wonder what this means for Cappuccino. Coming from a mac developer,
Cappuccino is awesome. I was able to jump right in writing a complicated web
app right away without having to use any javascript, html, or CSS. Lots of web
developers probably think this sounds stupid, but man, it's awesome.

~~~
boucher
Cappuccino is still doing well as an open source project. This won't have any
impact (aside from the unfortunate loss of a high profile example, but it was
also two years behind the state of the art).

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jchrisa
If you are interested in an open source alternative there is Swinger which you
can easily run your own copy of: <http://swinger.quirkey.com/>

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DiabloD3
What is 280 Slides? Ive never heard of this.

~~~
Tloewald
It was te original demo app for cappuccino the web app framework cloned from
cocoa to JavaScript and based on objective-j. They went on to build a web
equivalent of interface builder called atlas then got bought by Motorola.

~~~
DiabloD3
Wow, that looks damned interesting. So should I drop the whole thing off my
radar, or does Motorola axing everything not effect Objective-J and
Cappuccino?

~~~
jlazarow
Atlas seems effectively dead. Cappuccino is still developed but the original
founders (now at Motorola) seem to no longer be involved.

~~~
boucher
We're still involved, just not as much as we used to be, or as much as some of
our other contributors, as we all have other responsibilities.

~~~
heckler0077
So is Atlas really...dead? I was really pulling for it there for a while

