Okay. But it does? Our stats continue to show that making nerds happy (we're also nerds) leads to more corporate sales. (https://tailscale.com/blog/free-plan/ etc)
So if we can make something that we want ourselves and our friends and fellow nerds also like, and that also then leads to more corporate sales... why not?
Tailscale sold itself after that. The docs were excellent and it really is simple to use and run. I was able to do a full PoC in day and prove that I could join all of our environments and clouds into one VPN and have DNS resolving correctly everywhere.
We do?
I have a high opinion of them, one of the few VPN services I would trust not to give in even to governmental pressure. I firmly believe they would shut down their service before the compromised user privacy. That is very commendable
This is a pretty bad take. With your logic anything pro-privacy like Signal/Matrix etc would also be "x of choice for abuse/fraud/hacking etc" and thus shouldn't be used.
Mozilla is rebadged Mullvad. Proton might be ok. Everything else (Nord, Avast, Express, ...) is YouTube sponsor trash, Mullvad's the gold standard afaik.
Tailscale is clearly a superior product to it's competitors and I have regularly recommended colleagues and clients to evaluate whether it fits their needs. However, unfortunately, that is frequently not enough to "win" in the crowded and bureaucratic enterprise software space.
I would love to be proved wrong here and wish you the greatest success!
I’m pretty confident that you would draw an audit finding for that reason with a pure tailscale solution. (I also think that’s bullshit.)
Too many ChatGPT interactions lately, I suspect.
If the cops or the MPAA come calling, we'll tell them to go to hell. Netflix blocks our servers? We'll set up new ones. Accused of torrenting? We didn't see anything, and we don't know who you are either. We're incorporated in a jurisdiction that makes us almost impossible to sue. We've got 4 employees, and not a single clothes iron between us.
B2B VPN products often have the opposite market positioning - straight-laced, trustworthy stuff. Absolutely not claiming to be difficult to sue. We've got 50+ employees, all of them wear shirts and some even wear ties. And suppliers like cloudflare are more than happy to help you MITM all your employees' https traffic, in the name of "security".
These just seem like positions in the market that are very hard to reconcile.
They're required to do the former (and Switter) by American laws, and for the latter: they banned the Daily Stormer, 8chan after a terrorist incident, and Kiwi Farms after their members called for open violence. It's not hard to see why these three got banned, inciting violence is not covered by "free speech".
a) the strategic signal it sends re developer resource allocation and b) the market signal it sends, selling a security solution while partnering with a company (not a knock - I've been a mullvad customer!) that provides solutions which are frequently used to bypass compliance/regulatory controls.
I think Tailscale going after 3 wildly different market segments (hobbyists, smb/teams, enterprises) [0] is why we're likely to see more such features, not less.
Partnering with similarly aligned organizations like Tailscale and Tor seems like a good way of increasing the userbase without engaging in sketchy business models like the rest of the VPN competition.
This past summer I quit my job as Engr #3 of a startup. While there, I desperately tried to convince 1+2 that we should use tailscale instead of rolling our own VPN with wire guard and EC2. Couldn’t do it. The product was too magical and everyone was suspicious. I use it at home and tried very hard to make the case.
This feels more like a long term investment in breaking the “mesh” basis for their product. IMO it’s part of the magic and partially a problem. I couldn’t explain the security model for the mesh (as an outsider), and according to some comments it seems like it causes battery issues on mobile devices.
https://tailscale.dev/blog/battery-life
* 2% still affected according to https://tailscale.com/blog/reimagining-tailscale-for-ios/
Context: during government meetings in a particular region, their network policies would become more restrictive so that it’s only possible to connect to Chinese IPs. Chinese VPSs are exempt but cannot connect to Mullvad directly due to a Fortinet rule. Connections are done with a mix of Trojan-gfw, xray, and WireGuard
This feels like a bad idea, and perhaps it signals defeat in the enterprise space (where the tech would provide the most value, imo). Tailscale raised $100M last year, surely based on a theory of growth upmarket. While this partnership surely provides value to personal consumers, it feels, at best, a distraction from the larger opportunity and, at worst, counterproductive to achieving it.
I'm skeptical of the obvious counterpoint that this assists a flywheel of greater b2c satisfaction leading to b2b success...