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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 | Any questions? [19]