from Hacker News

SalesForce.com acquires Clipboard, plans to shut it down.

by kellegous on 5/9/13, 9:28 PM with 55 comments

• by Zikes on 5/9/13, 9:41 PM

  Launching an online bookmarking service seems like a pretty stable retirement plan nowadays.

• by gexla on 5/9/13, 10:04 PM

  Great service, worked well, looked good, team of developers, everything free.

  It seemed this thing was headed for acquisition from the start.

  I'm done using these sorts of services. If it doesn't run within my Emacs / Vim / Unix workflow then I won't bother, or I will build it myself.

• by cpursley on 5/9/13, 11:05 PM

  There's nothing wrong with selling to the right suitor but completely shutting down the product?

  Is anybody building a company for the long-haul these days, or has the home flipping bubble just moved over to the startup world?

  We need to start a trend / honor system for startups to sign so users know they won't be shafted down the road.

  I'm going to start a startup that has some standard legal docs that says you won't shut the company/product down even if acquired (disregarding business failure). You get a quality-mark type badge for your site.

• by pajju on 5/9/13, 10:42 PM

  I admired their innovative way of clipping, DOM manipulation, one of the best engineering teams of our time! Well, this must be a team-hire.

  Pinterest did pinning with just images, these guys did for grabbing any web content! Amazing. A great blogger tool. But once you start grabbing web content it starts to look like a bookmarking service. That's were they headed to.

  I would have paid them an yearly subscription. And I don't like to bookmark URL's, rather save interesting tit-bits of web-content to my Board. ( grab those useful HN comments and add to my Clipboard)

  Clipboard could have emerged as content-grabbing, content-management with collaboration, had they rolled out some paid-service model. They never even tried to speak to their users!

  Founders need to be accountable for such drastic shutdowns. And if such shutdown's happen often, don't users lose trust? Users kinda lose confidence to invest their energy and time on early-starup products. Right?

• by siculars on 5/9/13, 10:00 PM

  I consulted for Clipboard very early on. Gary Flake is a really smart, talented and drive engineer. I'm glad he got a chance to see this through. Sorry it didn't gain the kind of traction I'm sure the team was looking for. I hope some of their tech can be worked into the salesforce stack and will continue to live.

• by sachinag on 5/9/13, 9:52 PM

  The point is the domain name, gals and guys.

• by jmboling on 5/10/13, 1:14 AM

  Did they really just sign their shut-down notice with the words 'peace out'? I don't know why im surprised. Those two words sum up quite compactly the i-tell-myself-and-my-customers-i-give-a-shit-about-them-and-my-product-but-when-it-comes-down-to-it-i-honestly-could-care-less-ness that seems so prevalent in startup culture right now. What happened to genuinely giving a shit? I could actually summon a degree of respect for their decision if they had at least been real enough about it and added 'suckers' to the very end.

• by edwardbch on 5/9/13, 9:55 PM

  damn! now what I'm I supposed to do now with all of my cooking recipes?

  Seriously, I think I will go back to the old school word document for storing stuff, you can't trust services like this to last. Does anyone have a recommendation of a paid alternative that won't close?

• by DigitalSea on 5/9/13, 11:12 PM

  Bookmarking services are the new stock market it would seem. Feels like there have been numerous acquisitions and shutdowns of bookmarking services in the last 12 months. A good talent acquisition on Saleforce's part in the form of Gary Flake. He's regarded as one of the best engineers in the industry, he's really smart and will no doubt bring a lot of value to Salesforce.

  I understand a lot of people are frustrated, but at the end of the day, you're using a free service and to be honest not many start-ups are in it for the long-haul. Clipboard never quite got the traction it deserved.

• by stmchn on 5/9/13, 11:30 PM

  This is a bummer but I admire how they've handled the acquisition. I was an avid user of Punchfork until its acquisition and was bummed with the way they handled user data (More info here: https://github.com/fictivekin/openrecipes#the-story)

  I'm really glad they're giving users complete control to acquire their data and, even better, that they're encouraging developers to use their data and import it into other tools.

• by simplekoala on 5/9/13, 9:45 PM

  Any guesses on the acquisition price and/or windfall per employee?

• by tzury on 5/9/13, 10:04 PM

  I really love using clipboard.

  If SalesForce has some "forces" in it, they shall simply let a small team of 1 or 2 people to just maintain it.

  Or at least, opensource it.

• by samfisher83 on 5/9/13, 9:51 PM

  What is the point of aquire and shutting down. Is it just for employees?

  If you offered the employees more money they would work for you. Why payoff the VCs?

• by sriramk on 5/9/13, 10:49 PM

  One key bit here is Gary Flake, the founder/CEO of Clipboard is a industry legend and is a key hire (I believe he's going to become VP of Engg at Salesforce). If a talent acquisition, Salesforce is getting great talent.

• by dreadsword on 5/9/13, 9:47 PM

  How as clipboard differentiated from Pinterest? From what I can see, the difference is that it archives whatever you've clipped. Is there a proprietary technology element to this that has value for Salesforce?