I am so tired of the upbeat acquihire 'hey, users, this is good for you!' spin.
Our passion and our mission was to give you
the best way to make and share beautiful movies
made from the photos and videos on your phone.
Well, someone noticed!
...Ptch will shut down on January 2, 2014
If it is an acqui-hire, then think of the scenario. A team that's probably burned out. The passion probably died a while back and along with it went the mission.
What type of announcement do you expect?
We appreciate that you signed up for and used our product.
Things haven't gone as well as we had hoped and we're
exhausted. The truth is we'd be shutting down the site
in due time anyway but this is a better option for us and
doesn't make any real difference for you, our user.
It says they launched a year ago so this particular company was still very new. It may not apply to them but I imagine this applies to most acqui-hires.
Thanks again for your support of Product since our launch. It means the world to us, and it's been a terrific ride for us. Unfortunately, we haven't seen the broad usage of our service necessary to sustain it and we'll be shutting it down in X months. Luckily, BigCo is acquiring our team, which means that we'll have jobs making their quasi-similar product even better.
Here's how you get your data: (blah)
Here are some similar services you may want to consider moving to: (blah)
"Thanks again for your support of Product since our launch. It means we're now in a position to get acquired by Yahoo. In other words, your support means we get money. We could gush about how much you mean to us, but really, we're running a business here, with the explicit goal of making money. We've done that now, so, thanks!"
After the liquidation preference the founders
(probably 1-3 people) are likely to get 90%
of the remaining proceeds and the staff –
those engineers that the acquiring company
so desperately wants – would ordinarily
receive a very small proportion.
I wonder if the founders feel any pressure from the acquiring company to spin the acquisition as purely positive without revealing the more than likely disappointing outcome.
One of the online services I used most, Meebo, gave a similar goodbye message upon being acquired by google. Something like "We're excited for this! It's going to be great! By the way, we will be gone soon, bye!"
And then they were gone. I use Pidgin now, but I prefer just having it in the browser to use on any machine any time.
Ptch was incubated at Dreamworks and was a pretty high-profile project internally there. As another commenter noted, it was something along the lines of an instagram video type of app, with very notable enhancements (think the equivalent of instagram filters, powered by dreamworks technology and content).
It was publicly available in the iOS App Store but didn't get much traction. I'm not sure what's left of the team, as I believe all of the original mobile engineers were already poached.
"Make a ptch (pronounced "pitch") by combining the photos and videos on your phone, or using media from your social networks, like Facebook or Instagram.
Personalize it by easily adding captions, music, and effects."
Ask the users to download the data? Since they are about photos and videos, why not simply say "if you can provide us your Yahoo account, we will move all your data to Flickr in a private photo set"?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/26..., Marissa Mayer has made several statements about not having enough clip inventory for all of the ad inventory they have. User generated content is cheap... I have no idea if it's that, technology, acqui-hired, or what, though.
