What do you think would happen most of the time if these acquihires didn't happen? The companies would just go out of business and the services would be shut down anyway.
One alternative would be for these startups to scrimp and struggle for a long time on Ramen Profitability, maintaining their services while they sought to expand, find a business model, open up new veins while continuing the old, perhaps providing a graceful upgrade into the new portfolio.
I'm with the GP poster -while I probably would do the same thing in an acquihire situation, it does start to (somewhat) poison the well over time for newer startups.
While I love Path to bits - I have zero clue what their business model will be, and wonder what will happen to all my carefully journaled "moments" if Path gets acquhired sometime in the future. Somebody needs to come up with a good Diaspora like solution for personal journaling where _i_ control the data, and store it on something that is likely to be persistent (S3 is the only thing that I can think of that has a greater than 90% chance of being around in 10+ years. Dropbox, if they have good public offering, will likely be the second candidate)
I'd pay money for that - $10 for a Dropbox/S3 storage social network akin to what we get with Path today.
I don't think you really need to worry about Path being acquihired. Given the people involved, and the fact that they already turned down a reported 100 million acquihire offer from Google, I don't really expect Path to go that route.
For your question about a place to store all of your data, check out: http://lockerproject.org/. While it doesn't support Path yet (they don't have a public API) it certainly will when Path makes their API available.
Because an acquihire doesn't have a positive effect on Dave Morin's life. He's back at a big company again, and he's already filthy rich so what's a few more millions?
sure it does...it allows him to exit with his head held high, and allows to add another acquisition to his resume. And frees up his time to start up another idea that he thinks has a lot more chance of success.
Path actually did what you said, supposedly. Dave Morin reportedly paid the staff through some rough times, since then they came out of it better with a new product release. Their team is very experienced and doubt they'd do that kind of move.
Also as someone else said they've turned down very large offers.
Don't write off sbierwagen's comment as flippant. For this kind of thing, this will be more and more the future. I think.
I think a site that acts as a reseller/affiliate for pair.com, dropbox and the like, where all you do is set up someone's (new) domain, connect it to the storage provider, and provide an easy install of something jekyll-like and turnkey would be a good thing to try.
At first you'd only get people who are aware of the user-as-a-product issue with Google and other free providers, but as those providers are more widely recognized as problematic, the market will increase.
Are you thinking of a paid service? Because if you're describing a free service, it doesn't sound like much of a business proposition. And if you're describing a paid service, then I don't see how the storage provider angle is relevant.
Sure (some) startups have workable business models. Even posterous had a workable business model (if they had been able to beat tumblr). The problem for the companies getting acqui-hired isn't (generally) a lack of business model. It's a failure to succeed in executing on that model so acqui-hire is all they have left.
