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Facebook Buys a Private File Sharing Service
angry tapir writes "Facebook has purchased most of drop.io, an online content-sharing service, but the social-networking giant sounds more interested in acquiring the company's developers than its technology. Drop.io is a service that lets users create a 'drop' where they can share documents, videos and other digital content. The user can set a time for how long the drop will exist, decide who can view the content, set permissions for who can alter the content and share content in a variety of ways, including on Facebook."
What's the problem? Can't Facebook get attract good developers the regular way anymore? Hmm. Maybe all the smart ones know Zuckerberg is a jerk and the company culture is rendered uninhabitable by the swarms of junior-grade developers writing junior-grade PHP, and demand more money than they could negotiate this way.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
"Buying a company for its employees seems so much like a recapitulation of the feudal system."
I'd say it acknowledges the fact that the people in a company are worth more than some moronic idea about an imaginary intellectual property their lawyers concocted.
I'd say it acknowledges the fact that the people in a company are worth more than some moronic idea about an imaginary intellectual property their lawyers concocted.
While I would agree with you, why couldn't Facebook then just hire them? Why did their need to be a transaction between the company's purported owners and Facebook? Facebook is basically buying the company to buy its employment contracts, its relationship with its workers. That treats those employment contracts as a fungible commodity, and that doesn't sit very well with me.
It'd look really bad to say "Sorry, investors... I got a job offer at Facebook so that $9.95 million in funding you put into drop.io? Yeah, I hope it works out for you because I'm out of here." Not to mention the fact that most founders want to stick around and grow the business to a healthy size before they exit. This gives the founders and the investors a viable exit strategy rather than "I'm quitting to be a Facebook employee" which, though it's many steps up from quitting and working at McDonald's, has kind of the same ring to it.
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Serfs were bound to the land. Serfs couldn't leave even if they wanted to. Is Zuckerberg buying land? I don't think so! Are the baronies adjacent to Lord Zuckberberg's estate going to return his fleeing employees to the custody of His Lordship's baliffs? Gimme a f-ing break, man. Stop using the word serfs, it's not the word you're looking for, and it makes anyone who misuses it look uneducated.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Seriously the anti-corporate whining here is always a little silly but this takes it to the point of stupid. Serfs? You are kidding right? You realize that any of these people can at any time go get another job. They are just as free as they were at their former company. For that matter, being that FB is in California they could take the money then quit and go form a new company doing the same thing, since California doesn't allow for non-competes.
All it means is that they were recognized as a good team, and this is a good way to keep them as a team and keep them happy. This is particularly true if it was like many small companies where the employees are the owners. Sure FB could have just offered them all jobs but of course that leaves their company out there and a question of how they split their time and so on, presuming they all accept. Or they could offer them a buyout, again which they had to choose to accept, so that FB gets the employees, the tech, everything, and they are all happy.
When a company buys another they get everything, good or bad, that company had. All the employees, the buildings, the technology, the assets, the debt, the contracts, the responsibility. All of it. That is how it works. Usually, employees have reason to be concerned as one of the first things companies tend to do is look for redundant people. Here is sounds like they all get to keep working.
If that's the case, then it's not a very smart strategy, and he's probably wasting his money.
There's a BIG difference in working in a small start-up, or SME, and working in a corporation. In a small firm your contribution matters, you can get changes made quickly and easily, you can get projects started in days if not hours. In a corporation none of that is going to happen. You will be marginalized, you will have to book projects through complex bureaucracy, and the smallest change may not be possible, or may take months to achieve.
The quality of life and the work environment is far, far worse in a corporation. If you have a brain, are creative and are driven (like most people in start-ups are) you will be frustrated and disillusioned in a corporation after a year or two max.
Chances are, the people you think you are buying will move on to another firm, or start-up on their own within 2-5 years max. Those that don't will just phone-in the shadow of their former productivity whilst continuing to work for you.
Zuckerberg is many things, but he's not that stupid. This just sounds like buzzword "we care about people" crap. He's buying IP and he's killing competition. He doesn't give a fuck about people, I'm certain of it -- if he does, he's an idiot.
No, but the ideas in their heads are, and the employees don't own them even if the employees themselves created them. The IP system has increasingly in recent years been used by our aristocracy to maintain their position at the expense of everybody else.
Thinking about this is going to take me some time. The analogy is not perfect, the power to quit is a great equalizer (and I'm not saying it makes things equal, just much, much less skewed), but the fact this spawned so much debate makes me think that it's not so flawed as to be totally useless.
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