The part that galls me about this is not the shutdown – such is life in a world of cheap acquisitions and expensive maintenance – but the communication around it. For months, as Pixate went without updates, the Pixate team would placate the occasional "is Pixate being abandoned?" threads in the support community with vague reassurances that they were "working on something great."

And so it turns out that regardless of whatever this great thing is, there will be no continuity between Pixate and it, and anyone who relied on Pixate's cloud features will have to find something else in the meantime.

Personally, as I currently have an entire team using Pixate Cloud in the field, and now have less than a month to find, test, implement, and train an alternative, I can't say this experience has left me with much faith in whatever Google comes up with to replace it.

That's what you get for relying on a cloud solution...

As fair as this statement is to make, it doesn't make it suck any less. It's a sad state of affairs where this is commonplace enough.

The Cloud was supposed to FIX the problem of mobile computing, not exasperate it.

*exacerbate

Essentially this, and my biggest gripe with sending your entire life to these hosted services.

Yep, I'm really wondering exactly how many decades or centuries it'll finally take for people to understand the value of open-source/Free software. All I see is people bitching and complaining about how various proprietary solutions and services are failing them when they get the rug pulled out from under them: Windows 10 updates borks their computer or adds spyware or advertising, Google shuts down yet another service, some cloud service has terrible security or has a huge outage leaving their business unable to operate, etc. It's simple: if you don't control your own software and infrastructure, you have no control over your destiny and are at the whim of some other entity.

> We joined Google just over a year ago to continue our mission...

Well, that explains it.

It's good to know that their Incredible Journey will continue within the halls of Hooli…oops, Google!

Less than 30 days notice to get your data out, not ok.

Is there a list maintained of acqi-hired-shutdown projects by large companies.

There's "Our Incredible Journey (putting the ack! in acquihire)".

https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com

Alternatively there's http://wevebeenacquired.tumblr.com/, although OIJ is much more frequently updated.

Read this as "Pixel is no more" and thought I was about to read some super dramatic rant about Google's phone.

I think that signals I should get back to work.

And I read also read it as 'Pixel is no more' and went "Wait, what, Raspberry Pi just released that as their new desktop."

Off to call my eye-guy, may be time for new glasses. :-)

Kinda excited by this acqui-hire for once.

Google seems intent on building a good design tool, I hope that we will finally have a design tool for the adaptative UI era.

Let us hope. But what ends up happening in a big company is that their is tighter coupling between concerns, which locally looks like interference. At the very least it increases the resistance to iteration, and diffuses focus. Psychologically, I think it's also extremely difficult to go from being self-directed to manager-directed. That can build a lot of resentment that comes out in funny ways, like quitting.

Given that the desktop version (Pixate Studio) is based on Atom, will it stop working after they shutdown?

Nope, Studio will continue to work.

Ah, that's better than another recent tool company that was aquihired/shutdown - WagonHQ, which was also Atom based, but downloaded the core of the app when you started it up.

> Pixate Studio will no longer be available for public download. If you still need a copy, grab one here for OS X and Windows.

That seems like an odd choice.

Never heard of them. It's a shame this isn't a standalone application, actually looks pretty awesome to use.

Was it wireframing software?

Front end mobile prototyping - high fidelity & animatable

Never heard of them. But their product looks very slick.

I've yet to have ever heard of any of the companies in the daily "this startup is shuttering its service" posts. The spectrum of reactions always amuses me.

Often I get the feeling I'm watching a discussion about roster tweaks in minor league baseball. VC is an industry unto itself.

Hold up, lemme put on my shocked face... :|