PubSub is dying…

It’s a sad state of affairs for a service which I will say we all could have loved.

PubSub is like the ‘little train that could’… but didn’t, quite. I’ve always felt that PubSub was just waiting to happen. They had a core technology that had amazing results (some of the most accurate), but they never took off as quickly as they should, and I’m not the one to dig around to tell you why.

Well, the mysteries are partly unraveled by Bob Wyman here:

I believe firmly that the cause of our difficulties is not the team we have built nor is it the technology we’ve developed. Both are great. What has prevented us moving forward is a battle with a group of minority shareholders, some of whom claim to be lead by our ex-CEO Salim Ismail and are, in any case, primarily his "friends and family." This group is using very unusual clauses in our Shareholder’s agreements to block mergers or financings. We’ve found it difficult to determine their motives, however, some have said that they believe that it is in their interest to drive the company into bankruptcy so that they can buy our software and start a new company. Of course, I believe that by the time we go through bankruptcy proceedings, we won’t have any employees and frankly, a software company without the employees that developed its software is worthless. Our assets will have a much higher value if we have the employees available, thus, the best course at this time is to sell our assets, trademarks, etc. to cover the outstanding debt and make our employees available to the purchaser.

So, a shareholder is wielding such power as to stop funding in order to gain assets to the technology. A stumbling block like this would indeed prevent PubSub from getting the funding they need to push PubSub effectively into the market and move the technology forward.

It’s a sad loss for the blogosphere.

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