Atlassian Acquires The Browser Company
Atlassian (tweet, Hacker News):
We’ve entered into an agreement to acquire The Browser Company of New York, the team behind the incredible Dia and Arc browsers.
By combining The Browser Company’s passion for building browsers people love with Atlassian’s deep expertise on how the world’s best teams operate, we have the opportunity to transform how work gets done in the AI era.
Atlassian is paying $610 million in cash for The Browser Company, and plans to run it as an independent entity.
As a VC-backed company, perhaps The Browser Company was always going to need to sell. My initial reaction is Atlassian seems a weird fit. But maybe not?
Overall, I believe this is a positive move for users of the Arc browser. The acquisition gets The Browser Company out of the venture capital rat race and moves it under the oversight of Atlassian, best known to TidBITS readers for its 2017 acquisition of Trello, the task management tool we used extensively during the Take Control days (see “Trello Offers Compelling Collaboration Tool,” 9 July 2012). Atlassian also develops Jira, a project management platform, and Confluence, a collaborative documentation tool, both primarily targeted at developers.
Previously:
4 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
No idea how this is positive for Arc. The Verge says Arc will continue in the same path it's in (maintenance mode), despite TBC saying Atlassian has a 1,000+ user internal Slack channel of Arc fans.
They claim to be building Arc workflows into Dia but I have no interest in Dia, so I guess... good luck?
Sorry for the fast follow, but maybe this is "positive" in the sense that it's not necessarily negative (like meaning the end of maintenance). I personally think that's more neutral than positive, though.
So that great pivot to AI saw the company survive for about, what, a month before failing into acquisition?
