When a company with a huge user base (Mozilla) acquires a company with a much smaller user base (Pocket), they're probably not doing it to cross-sell the smaller user base.

I thought Mozilla was going to be investing in Pocket and giving them the resources to grow, as well as sending them Mozilla's users — a fraction of whom would become premium Pocket subscribers.

But as far as I can tell, there haven't been any notable new features in the last 5 years. In fact, some stuff like the web app have gotten noticeably worse. I used to use Pocket almost daily, but now I use it maybe once every couple months.

So what was the point?

I’m not really sure. I’ve been using Pocket since it was Read It Later and it hasn’t become very much more useful to me since then. It probably could have advanced in many more ways given the right people and resources. They have access to these, but the great innovations have been in bundling the product and administering its accounts.

I’m glad they haven’t changed the Pocket experience too much. I still use and pay for Pocket but I’ll probably jump ship to pinboard or build a personal solution if they do something that diminishes the value I find in it today. The most likely ways this could happen is by reducing functionality (e.g., discontinuing clients/APIs), adding unwanted things (more advertising and social media), and doing things that seem unexplainably arbitrary (see: colorways). Pocket works everywhere I need it to, it has acceptable design and performance, and it has demonstrated some maturity and resilience as a product that’s around 15 years old.

Other solutions I’ve tried include clips in Evernote, OneNote, Zim; the app Keep Everything; the services RainDrop and Larder; and e-mailing myself. All of these except the last turned out to be more of a hassle to put up with than using Pocket.

If Pocket gets worse, I’ll probably make my own solution with e-mail. I practically never look at or for anything I save in Pocket, so it would seem my main attraction is the ease of sending things into a vault from anywhere I’m likely to use the internet and the confidence that I can find these another day. I’ll probably be able to access all my old e-mails in 10 years, there’s pretty good search, and it’s ubiquitous (although it is easier to use HTTP than SMTP in some scenarios).

I've never understood - what does Pocket do over 'save to reading list' in your browser? That's how I save things to read later - and it's free.

Fair question. For me, it was the cross-device sync and offline functionality. Also, save to reading list didn’t exist when I started using Pocket.

Some people also use Pocket as a repository.

I don’t know. I guess I stated using it before that was a common feature, and it was useful to have a cross-platform way to save bookmarks across devices. It’s the easiest cross browser option IMO.

Money laundering? Fundamental incompetence? Pick any reason honestly, they all make the same amount of sense. I've never understood why Mozilla bought Pocket.

I don’t know what the economics were, but it may have been a soft landing / acquihire. I’m sure some people believed in the business case, but the driving force for the acquisition may well have been a VC that wanted an exit, a well-connected founder, etc.