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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

(www.cnbc.com)
520 points kevinyew | 4 comments | 04 Sep 25 12:12 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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crowcroft ◴[04 Sep 25 15:30 UTC] No.45128398[source]▶
The strategic insight behind Arc was perfect – your browser IS the Operating System, and so we should build a browser that can function as that platform.

Arc had pretty good market validation with early adopters, they say that growth was flattened out but IMO that's normal for most products, and it's up to the company to find out WHY growth flattened and then solve that problem. Not kill the product and chase some entirely new idea about AI.

I wouldn't be surprised if the investors were fed up with the business and wanted out, pretty good exit all things considered.

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bhouston ◴[04 Sep 25 17:35 UTC] No.45129916[source]▶
> The strategic insight behind Arc was perfect – your browser IS the Operating System, and so we should build a browser that can function as that platform.

Marc Andreessen said famously (or at least is paragraphed as saying) in 1994 that the "Browser is the Operating System" and people have been doing riffs on that since then.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/04/22/always...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/09/software-...

This was also the idea behind Chromebooks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS

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crowcroft ◴[04 Sep 25 17:45 UTC] No.45130031[source]▶
Which is why tactics are so important. I would say no one has actually got the experience right yet, 'browser is the OS' has been true for a long time, and no one has delivered it yet.

Similar to ambient computing and augmented reality.

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1. mattlutze ◴[04 Sep 25 20:20 UTC] No.45131793[source]▶
One might suggest Cromebooks have done so well because Google got it more or less right.
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2. Imustaskforhelp ◴[04 Sep 25 20:23 UTC] No.45131829[source]▶
I think that they had the fact that in chromebook, they could run whole linux containers in the browser , right?
3. jemmyw ◴[04 Sep 25 20:31 UTC] No.45131903[source]▶
I think Chromebooks have done so well because they're cheap and are purchased for locked down environments (education and people who really don't want complexity). Even then, I think they kind of demonstrate that the browser is NOT the OS because users and Google still felt the need to break out of the browser box, with both Android apps and Linux application support.
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4. enos_feedler ◴[06 Sep 25 16:01 UTC] No.45150426[source]▶
The browser is the OS that wraps the user not the machine. Just as Linux or Windows or Android wrap the machine and manage its resources, the browser should wrap the user and manage their resources (data, time/focus etc). In this regard nobody has succeeded. The browser isn’t finished until it achieves this