> An incredible journey is: One company buying another and closing its services down. This is a purchase of the second company’s staff, rather than their product. An acquihire.

> This is what is galling. A company that can afford to pay millions for some new staff but not for what those staff built. The people who used the service, and invested their belief and time in uploading photos, or forming friendships, or logging data, are left to find new virtual homes while their former hosts enjoy a nice (if possibly delayed) payday.

> This repeated pattern only encourages more people to create flashy services that have no hope of being sustainable businesses in their own right, but may survive long enough, with VC funding, to attract the attention of a large company eager for new ideas and staff.

The last paragraph is what gets me -- it makes sense to me found startups in hopes to be acquired (continue their work with the support of a big company), but founding with the intention to abandon your users? Yuck.