Re:Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager
by oooyay on Monday September 25, 2023 @08:38AM
(#37642747)
Right Scale was a cost management platform; this is the product now: https://www.flexera.com/products/cloud-management-platform. I don't think I'd refer to it as consumer oriented. The exit seems to be motivated by a shift to containers, which building cost models for is a significantly different business: https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/09/26/flexera...
Based on the interview I linked BitWarden is going down a venture of trying to offer vault-like enterprise secrets management on top of BitWardens tech, which could mean they're trying to monetize the more enterprise side of their business.
A strong negative signal as far as I am concerned.
For a consumer-oriented software startup, an “exit” is most of the time a polite euphemism for selling the userbase to a juicing machine of some sort; the second place is taken by selling the product to an enterprise-oriented business which doesn’t want the userbase and eventually will, with more or less grace, show them the door.
Therefore, when I see a consumer-oriented, VC-funded startup, I don’t see why I should consider trusting them for even a second. Dine on the free lunch while it lasts, yes; squirrel away every bit of software they’re willing to release, yes; trust, depend on, or invest even a tiniest bit of my time, no.