New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
Good points, @225thinker
Makes me think about the RoyalMail audit on Horizon where they received the 'points of interest' and then fired the team before the report was actually released?
But what is the problem with them being acquired by Notion? Notion is big...and popular service.
Shame to what was looking like a promising option disappear. Particularly going over to Notion and just closing all services, rather than having a buyer that could continue to invest in the offerings and continue to develop things. All seems like a bit of a waste, how this has transpired, and some competition for the likes of Proton and Tutanota was good for the market.
Because their entire product suite is being shutdown with the acquisition.
EDIT: I see you guys already answered it... well, here's my long answer!
It's not an issue being acquired in general, which could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the company doing the acquiring. Let's set aside the extra issue we haven't discussed yet, which is that Notion is NOT known for its privacy, and Skiff's entire concept was built around privacy.
The issue in this specific case is that with this "acquisition," Skiff is now shutting EVERYTHING down, so there will be nothing, nada, zippo services left, and no transition or rebranding or anything to bring over 2 million Skiff users. Notion has no email services, for example, so you are basically being DUMPED. And you have six months to transition out. It's basically a giant "f#$k off" to the many people who relied on their services. That's it, done, good bye. It's just an awful way to send off their customers.
So it's a very strange "acquisition," where the buying company (Notion) is basically terminating all the services of the acquired company (Skiff) and not even offering a transition over to their comparable services or accounts... not to mention there is no email at Notion.
Presumably in the future, perhaps Notion plans to create an email platform with the talent and experience of the "acquired" Skiff team... but one would think if that was the case, they'd keep Skiff alive during a transition, right? Or maybe rebrand? Or something else? But no, Notion is vaporizing the entire product suite of Skiff.
So that's the problem with the acquisition... that's about 2 million users (according to Skiff as of November last year) who are now kicked out the door, bye! What a strange thing to do to all those customers.
The question is what Notion hopes to gain by acquiring Skiff.
And why can't Notion sell off or spin off the existing Skiff service, if they have no interest in that product.
Personally, I think it has to do with Sequoia, which by the look of it, is running the show here. As I mentioned previously (I don't want to get too repetitive!) Sequoia is the Venture Capital firm behind both Notion and Skiff.
And yes, it is a bit odd that they are not spinning off, transitioning, or rebranding any of Skiff's prior work. It suggests to me that this is a Sequoia write off, and a reorganization of the teams, to bring in the Skiff staff to expand whatever Notion is working on. Perhaps they plan to release a huge expansion to Notion and add email based on IP/concepts that Skiff was already working on, etc... but what gets me is why would they discard 2 million users?
Adding to what has already been said, Skiff, a "privacy" focused company, is being acquired by a company that doesn't care about privacy.
skiff suite is open source.
https://skiff.com/open-source
https://github.com/skiff-org/skiff-apps
Ah.
I was wondering what the purpose of Notion buying Skiff was, only to cancel it. I could see buying it and keep running it to enjoy the profits and cross-market to that customer base.
But to buy it and kill it? Only if Skiff was a Notion competitor - I don't think they really are. Or if Skiff had some rare, cutting edge skill pool (i.e., the bleeding edge of AI or something), they could buy it just to poach the devs and still shut down, but I don't think that's the case.
So this is VCs trying to shuffle their books.
Why? An acquirer would want to see an audit of the finances, sure.
But why would Notion care about an audit of Skiff's privacy, code, transparency, etc.? They're shutting it down.
Does this mean anyone can easily rebuild Skiff?
as long as it is under the terms in their opensource license which is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0.
Which isn't an open-source license due to the non-commercial aspect.
The apps might be, that's it. You'd still need to somehow figure out their backend.
Skiff was better than Proton in many terms.
but finally I'll stick to Proton now, at least they're still alive.
In what ways was Skiff better than Proton?
Firstly, not as greedy. Custom domains were free (as they should be), and the same was true for most of the stuff Proton charged for. No wonder Proton would rather buy them out than compete with them.
When did Proton indicate they’d be interested in buying them out?
Oh my god, I feel so stupid. Holy fuck. My brain somehow read 'Proton' instead of 'Notion'.
They were really killing it
Killing their VC funding too I guess. They were simply not operating a sustainable business. The free plan offered so much there was no incentive for really anyone to pay.
All good
. Was wondering if you were referring to some past announcement or something given Protons not involved in todays news.
Frankly a buyout by Proton would make more sense to me and at least could have resulted in a better transition for the users. Could have even preserved the @skiff addresses.
Just moved our email to Skiff a few months ago and apart from the lag, it was a good service. Can't wait to tell the team we're moving again haha.
What exactly is this acquiring and sunset pattern? 3 fine services i know that shut down without any information about transitioning. Fyi, it's Rafttio, Airplane, and now Skiff.
What if it’s spaceship next ?
I could be way wrong, but it seems Namecheap has too much invested to allow that.
And if they do decide to shut down, hopefully they have enough sense to wait until Namecrane is up and running.
Spaceship is a brand of NameCheap.
When you get an offer that cannot refuse, considering the roller-coaster ride of a startup, i guess the founder did the right thing. But they should not had shutdown the current services, instead they can migrate to a new platform with existing users.
I know.