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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

(www.cnbc.com)
520 points kevinyew | 2 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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scrlk ◴[04 Sep 25 21:02 UTC] No.45132151[source]▶
> 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.

Isn't that downstream of Sun Microsystems’ old slogan: The Network is the Computer?

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

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mananaysiempre ◴[04 Sep 25 21:37 UTC] No.45132501[source]▶
AFAICT, Sun’s underlying vision was more on the side of pervasive RPC and/or downloadable code, i.e. closer to DCOM or NeWS than HTTP.

(We have in fact ultimately ended up layering downloadable code on top of HTTP. I don’t think I like the results, yet some of the things I don’t like seem inherent to downloadable code in general.)

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zer00eyz ◴[04 Sep 25 23:16 UTC] No.45133314[source]▶
It was more than this. The Sun Ray thin clients were so frigging impressive.

The problem wasn't the tech, the problem was it was SUN. It ran on Sun Hardware, with Sun Software and all at Sun Prices. Metaframe was just so much cheaper (it was also hot garbage but thats another story).

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positron26 ◴[05 Sep 25 04:15 UTC] No.45134928[source]▶
Given that, in the back of every customer's mind, across all segments, they cannot allow one vendor to have or exert too much control, it is a wonder why any company would seek to own a platform to such an extent. The better and more integrated you get, the more of a risk you become.

And of course I'm speaking on the context of what I'm building, not the world we're in. There are plenty of platforms that are more important than what they platform. I believe it was Bill Gates that said the value of all the things on the platform must exceed the platform itself. We have some inversions at present that are ripe to undergo Rayleigh–Taylor instability.

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1. tormeh ◴[05 Sep 25 07:27 UTC] No.45135893[source]▶
Really? Most businesses leave their eternal soul and their firstborn in the care of Microsoft, with no backup plan. I just don't buy this.
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2. positron26 ◴[05 Sep 25 08:02 UTC] No.45136134[source]▶
Microsoft is not just Microsoft. It's the cottage industry around products like Excel. It's all the other PC applications. It's WHQL getting hardware vendors into the fold. Compare all that to Apple. Apple is big, but not compared to the greater continent of Microsoft. People are more concerned about Apple's walled gardens than Microsoft's. It's no coincidence that Apple has taken more heavy handed actions to rule their platform more. That is why their platform is smaller overall and why people don't trust them.