I agree with all these posts. Every single one. It’s a toughie.
Here’s the sum of my conclusions so far:
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We’ve all got to know the people at DT quite well (in a cyber-space kinda way) over the last few years - they’re nice guys, talented, hard-working, extraordinarily helpful, and deserve every success. It seems to me that all the posts on this thread are, if you read between the lines, from people who like and admire Eric and Christian and the others and wish them well. Also, as several posters have pointed out, it’s their company - they built it from scratch with their own lily-white hands - they can do what they like with it. They didn’t even have to tell us they’d sold (but they did - and they’re smart guys, they knew what the reaction would be). So, way to go.
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Now, a lot of posts here are - like everything these days - about Iraq. There’s a strong anti-US (especially anti US-military) sentiment in Europe and elsewhere at the moment, and, less often commented on, a strong anti-Europe sentiment in the States. This is a deep, deep rift - a generation-long one, perhaps - and, certainly among people I know, and including myself, there’s no inclination to restore cordiality for the time being. Both sides will continue to bear their satisfying grudge, and like millions of other people on both sides, I don’t necessarily regard that as a bad thing. (For the record, I’m extremely proud to call myself Old Europe). Well, it seems to me that those who are pro-US (for want of a better term) regard the whole Iraq thing as irrelevant to the DT merger, and that they’re wrong to think so, and that them thinking so is precisely part of the problem; while those who are anti-US (for want of a better term) regard it as a take-over, not a merger, and worry about the Pentagon picture and everything, and yes, it’s hand-wringing, but some of us regard that as better than actively collaborating with things we strongly disapprove of. Here’s how that affects DT specifically:
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“You’re either with us or against us,” Mr Bush once famously said; and it is possible that, for once in his life, he was saying something both coherent and true. There is a sense among some of DT’s customers - including myself - that DT used to be “our” kind of company, and is no longer. It was centred around two guys running out of (for all anyone knew) a garage somewhere in a small town in post-reunification Germany - it’s the Apple/ Google myth. They ran ethical campaigns, careless of the effect it would have on sales. Their bulletin boards are bilingual - Old Europeans are proud of the plurality of their languages - and had their head office in London, EU, not London, UK. In short, quite besides them having a great product, they had the kind of image that many people (again, including myself) would describe as “cool”. And those people feel… betrayed…
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As for the future - I think probably the product is OK for a while. Unlike one of the posters to this thread, I am convinced by Eric’s plaintive “It’s still us”; the oldest line in the book, maybe, but the first time DT have used it, and everyone is entitled to resort to emotional blackmail once and be trusted for it (Mr Blair take note). Of course you should have exit strategies - Christian himself said so somewhere - because your data is important and you don’t know what will happen. But I think the product itself will be safe for a couple of years at least, and usable for many more after that. And now that DT is getting bigger, other companies’ products might start importing DT databases…
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Personally - I still don’t know. To be frank, AgentScience (I nearly wrote AgentSmith there - too much the Matrix!) is the kind of company I’d run a mile from, no matter how perfect their product was for me. But I’m used to DT, and know its quirks, and use it every day, and I don’t think - realistically - I’m going to abandon that. Indeed, I’ll probably buy Pro. I mean, the merger is a done deal; there’s no way DT are going to change their minds, even if they could, and a few people saying they’re going to move to another app is going to hurt no one but those few people. Besides, things change - “fire rests by changing”, Heraclitus said. But weighing everything up, all the advantages and dis-, I wish it hadn’t happened. Kinda put a real damper on my week.
Thanks for reading.
Robert Loughrey
London
EU
). Christian and me have never believed that borders do any good. Mentally, we deny their existence.