The Inside Story of BitTorrent Inc’s Collapse
Jessi Hempel (via Hacker News):
But transforming this technology into any kind of business has proved elusive. By last spring, BitTorrent had already endeavored to become a media company, twice. There was BitTorrent Entertainment Network, launched in 2007, which was a storefront for movies and music that made no money and shut down a year later. And then there was the BitTorrent Bundle, launched in 2013, which was a competitor to iTunes and Amazon that let artists distribute their work directly to fans at a fraction the cost. In 2014, the company even announced plans to produce its own original series, a scifi show called Children of the Machine. But by early the next year, BitTorrent had given up on this strategy, too.
[…]
The latest chapter of BitTorrent’s saga begins in earnest in 2015. By then, many of the company’s executives and directors were exhausted. They still couldn’t agree on a path forward for the company. Some people believed it should double down on its technical business, building products people loved. They’d developed a product called Sync, for example, which was a decentralized version of Dropbox. Others wanted it to be an entertainment company, striking deals to send content to those people. With no focus, the company had reached an impasse. Earlier that year, BitTorrent had laid off nearly a third of its 150 employees.
[…]
Perhaps the lesson here is that sometimes technologies are not products. And they’re not companies. They’re just damn good technologies.
In early 2016, Resilio Inc. was spun out of BitTorrent Inc. to bring the power and resilience of distributed technology to the modern enterprise. Resilio started with core BitTorrent technology and hardened it for commercial use while adding the centralized management and control required for modern IT.
Previously: Replacing Dropbox With Resilio Sync.
