End of the Road for Xmarks

It's always sad when someone's dreams are shattered. But what I don't get is why a bookmark syncing service needs venture capital, employees, a CEO and whatnot. There may not be a business model that supports all that, but there may be a business model that pays for the labor actually required to provide a syncing service.

In a way this is like shutting down all the cafes that failed to become Starbucks.

You don't get why a bookmark syncing service needs venture capital, employees, a CEO and what not?

Web applications don't just grow on trees ...

My guess is that this has a lot to do with when they started. In 2006, the cloud platforms we take for granted today didn't exist. Running a service meant buying servers, hiring an ops team, etc. Starting today, you could probably bring a sync service up on App Engine in a few weeks and operate it for a couple hundred bucks a month.

I started my last company in 2005, and I've often thought that if we had started a couple of years later when the cloud platforms were available, we could have been a lot more successful. Instead we built a product and an organization around an obsolete technology stack with a high cost structure, and there was no going back.