TextDrive + Joyent = w00t!

TextDrive has merged with Joyent, Inc., and it’s good news for all concerned. We’re tickled pink, and I’ll explain why.

Official press release here.

It’s easy to bristle at talk of mergers and acquisitions – to imagine layoffs, abandoned goals, scorched earth – but I can assure you nothing of the sort is going on here. This particular combination is of two companies that share similar ideas and ambitions, as well as the desire to do things right. Nothing’s being abandoned, no one is being laid off, and everything we do is going to get a massive boost.

Joyent has developed an excellent suite of collaborative software (see Jason’s thoughts here) which kind of puts everything similar out there into the dustbin. It’s a powerful network app that just sings with simplicity and ease of use, and our customers will get a taste of that when the Joyent mail client becomes TextDrive’s standard webmail app in late December.

While Joyent does wicked-smart software, they lacked a certain oomph when it came to servers and infrastructure. Enter TextDrive, where, despite the small miracle that is StrongSpace, we could use a bit of help on the application front (hearing TextPanel referred to as vapourware hurts, man). We do however have the server thing down cold, and thus the two companies, combined, now have their respective ambitions rendered limitless. Put another way, we have the whole damn Web 2.0 thing covered every which way imaginable.

What’s changing at TextDrive? Nothing, really: we’ll continue strong with shared hosting, and now also ramp up our dedicated and business hosting lines. Other than getting more disk space and bandwidth, current customers can expect things to be just as before, with all the improvements we’ve been discussing proceeding as planned. VC lifetime accounts will of course continue to be honoured, because TextDrive is still TextDrive.

TextDrive, StrongSpace and RailsBase are now Joyent companies, where they’ll be in pretty good hands: I’m giving up my CEO pointy hat to become President and Director of Joyent Europe, Jason is Chief Technology Officer, and Ryan is Director, Systems Operations. All very grownup and exciting. Joyent’s CEO, David Young, who you’ll all get to know here and through our various weblogs, is someone I would happily have hired to work at TextDrive, and everyone else I’ve met there strikes me as our kind of people.

So it’s a good thing all around. Plus we get John Gruber.

·:· Posted 28 November 2005, 19:05 by Dean Allen to About TextDrive  |  

  1. All I can say is, wow.

    — Schwarz    28 November 2005, 19:10    #
  2. All I can say is w00t

    — Ruairi    28 November 2005, 19:49    #
  3. Congrats to all involved—onward and upward!

    — EJC    28 November 2005, 19:51    #
  4. I would’ve never expected this, but I hope this doesn’t change the TxD we have come to love. More power to you guys!

    — Swaroop C H    28 November 2005, 20:18    #
  5. Congratulations TextDrive :)

    — Jacques Marneweck    28 November 2005, 21:34    #
  6. How come here it says “TextDrive merged with Joyent” and at joyent.com it says “Joyent acquires TextDrive”? I smell a conspriacy!

    — Aaron    28 November 2005, 22:31    #
  7. Congrats to all involved. Looks to be a great move around the board. Fantastic Rails App Acquires Fantastic Rails Host.

    — Nick    29 November 2005, 04:14    #
  8. That’s great news. Is the entire Joyent suite: Calender, People, Files & Mail being set up for us? That would be brilliant.

    :)

    — Ryan    29 November 2005, 04:41    #
  9. This is so cool! I can’t wait to play with some of Joyent’s software for Christmas. :)

    — Jeff Wheeler    29 November 2005, 04:49    #
  10. Quote: VC lifetime accounts will of course continue to be honoured, because TextDrive is still TextDrive.

    Actually, it’s a Joyent company. (Btw, love the oh btw tone of that line, Dean.) VCs were arguably toast when TxD became a pyramid scheme with the never, ever gonna happen VC3.

    I knew it the moment you insisted that VCs were a calculated “risk,” Dean. How so, really?

    Like a classic pyramid scheme, step 2 is always to transition off the accumulated values of the founding company while maintaining the face value of the original “shares” just long enough to make it all seem legit.

    Oh, Joyent. All very grown up and exciting.

    — Kool Aid    29 November 2005, 08:49    #
  11. Oh yes, Are Flagan, our macchiavellian schemings know no bounds. You like so nailed it.

    Yawn.

    — Dean Allen    29 November 2005, 09:48    #
  12. Awesome! TextDrive continues to evolve. Evolution is Good!

    — Shawn Anthony    29 November 2005, 12:34    #
  13. Woah! That Joyent Email app looks sweet! Can’t wait!!

    — Tracy Floyd    29 November 2005, 13:23    #
  14. This is truley excellent news. TextDrive needs more support staff, so the rest of you can get to work on TextPanel :-)

    — Robin Pelham    29 November 2005, 15:21    #
  15. whoa

    — david    29 November 2005, 18:39    #
  16. Are we getting just Mail from Joyent, or all their awesome software?

    — Jeff Wheeler    30 November 2005, 02:12    #
  17. Congrats!

    — Heiko Hebig    30 November 2005, 09:52    #
  18. Congrats go to everyone at Textdrive, good luck getting everything down cold.

    New blog looks nice, but the number of comments is in the ‘title’ element of each RSS item in brackets ( this article appears right now in my feed reader as ‘TextDrive + Joyent = w00t! [21]’).

    This is nice, but when I post this comment, my feedreader will see the title change, and think that the article has been updated. This is fairly annoying. Fix please?

    — Jesse Newland    30 November 2005, 17:46    #
  19. It seems to me like there’s mostly users that bring down servers with less than perfect code and such… There’s a lot of developers on TextDrive.

    Oh, and could you guys be a little bit more specific about what this means to TextDrive users. Will we get more than the mail thing? Will it effect StrongSpace and TextPanel? Will StrongSpace and TextPanel be more like the Joyent products?

    — David    1 December 2005, 01:09    #