I remember all the person years spent moving Flickr (and Delicious and other sites) onto Yahoo usernames. This used to be such an easily profitable business, and now it's a basket case. That's not a dig at the new owners, who are doing a labor of love. Our industry is not healthy
Think of all the products that used to exist that did something helpful, and that you can't find now in any form. They would still be viable medium-size businesses in any other industry, but get torn apart by the tidal forces of venture capital in ours.
It would be nice to grow to where I had a couple of employees, but at that scale I can't compete with VC-backed competitors that come and go every two years. I imagine the same holds true in other pockets of the industry. I don't know how 2-20 person companies do it and survive.
This limitation on viable business size is a weird feeling, like if you were allowed to keep a basil plant on the windowsill, but Monsanto comes and tears out your kitchen garden if you try to plant one. Which, come to think of it, sounds like a Monstanto thing to do
I'm unhappy about the free money sloshing through tech not because I didn't get my share (Mr. Pinboard eats steak every night, thank you very much), or because it makes the wrong people rich, but because of what it destroys in passing
Anyway, the takeaway from this thread is that for most of the company's life, the principal economic activity at Yahoo was moving acquired websites onto Yahoo usernames. I watched a lot of good friends die inside!
