> With Nullsoft gone and Frankel spending his time building a special-effects computer for his electric guitar...
I don't know what happened to the Jesusonic he was building then, but Justin Frankel ended up creating Reaper, the cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux digital audio workstation that is a solid Pro Tools competitor in a mere 16 MB download:
The installer for the whole DAW is smaller than most add-on VST effects. Some of my favorite albums have been recorded with Reaper, and obviously I'm a Reaper fan and use it too. Just like Winamp, you can pay for it, but if you really can't afford it, there's no time limit and it won't stop you from using it.
Showing my age here, but if you have a copy of the Walnut Creek CD-ROMs with demoscene archives, there's a demo by "Nullsoft" from pre-Winamp days hiding somewhere in there as well.
EDIT: Aww, fwirt beat me to it while I was typing! I guess I'll leave my comment here to add the Nullsoft demo mention. Found a link to his MSDOS demos here: https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1618
I remember Reaper v2 being like a 4.7mb download at a time when nuendo/cubase/cakewalk/protools etc were >1GB plus samples. With a nicer summing engine and more stable, lower latency vst host than any of them. And the only one with a decent, revenue-dependent tiered license. What a legend.
REAPER is awesome! It has been my DAW of choice for 15 years now. It opens instantly, it's very fast and snappy and it practically never crashes.
I particularly like the concept that everything is just a track. In REAPER, tracks can be arbitrarily nested, they can contain all kinds of items and you can route signals between them.
You need a group? Just make a track and add other tracks to it.
You need a bus? Just a make track and send to it from other tracks.
You need an instrument track? Just add a VSTi to it.
You need a MIDI track? Just add a MIDI item.
In most other DAWs, these are all different things, for no good reason IMO.
It's a straight line from Jesusonic to Reaper: Jesusonic JSFX script is in Reaper, and there's a whole selection of stock JS plugins that come with it and it's actually quite easy to program.
I seem to recall he was also working on some software that allowed musicians to jam together over the internet, it somehow took advantage of inherent latency instead of just trying to minimize it.
I've never used it, but it's a fascinating idea. The quirk is that no two participants, assuming they're each actually playing and not just listening, will hear the same thing. The following things happen simultaneously:
* Alice will play for X measures, while hearing what everyone else (including Bob) played X measures ago
* Bob will play for X measures, while hearing what everyone else (including Alice) played X measures ago
So for the measures mentioned above, Alice might conclude that things went very well, and Bob might conclude that things didn't jibe, and even if these were each true objective facts, they could both be correct as they are not discussing the same thing. There can be no retrospective discussion of a shared experience, only of individual experiences.
I used to use ninjam many years ago, I don't remember the delay being a deal breaker for me, it was just a fun way to practice with other players. If you found a good drummer you could just jam along and have fun with it.
> Reaper is currently a de-facto standard for game audio design
Such a wide and strong claim, I'm not sure there is a single de-facto choice specifically for "game audio design", I've seen most major DAWs, including Reaper, to be used for game audio. If anything is close to a de-facto standard in video game audio, it'd be Wwise and/or FMOD as audio middlewares, then whatever the artists happen to be familiar with for the actual production.
Unless you're talking about some specific genre here, either music- or game-wise?
From my experience, it’s very rare to see someone not using Reaper for sound design. Some use Pro Tools or Cubase, but they aren’t as common as Reaper. It really has no competition due to how easy it is to prepare dozens of assets with a single render (all with correct naming and loudness) as well as extensions that add features no other DAW has (e.g. Global Sampler, stuff by LKC Tools, etc.).
It’s not very good for music, though, so here, the situation is a bit more diverse. So yes, I’m talking concretely about sound design.
I think now it seems clear you're talking about "sound effect design" specifically maybe, rather than sound design? Particularly because you say it's not good for music production, but plenty of us do sound design together with music product, but I've also never done sound effect design, which it does sound like you're talking about.
Additionally to Winamp, I guess what I will always remember Nullsoft with is also "NSIS - Nullsoft Scriptable Install System" [0]. In a previous job I sat down, read the docs and wrote a Windows-Installer for our product using this thing, since management didn't want to pay for InstallShield.
What made quite an impression on me back then was the fact that the scripting language somewhat resembles assembly. [1] Also, NSIS had/has a tool called "NSIS Dialog Designer" which I used to design the Installer forms.
It was quite the fun experience and I'm pleasantly surprised that NSIS is supported to this day [2].
Yep, NSIS is awesome and my team is still using it to package Windows builds of at least two apps. I was pleasantly surprised to see Tauri [0] includes NSIS as one of its built-in installer options.
My first IT job in the late aughts we had a small windows utility that came packaged in a zip file rather than an installer, and we wanted to deploy it across the network. I figured out what registry keys the .exe needed and created a NSIS installer that could be run silently, quickly, and remotely - fun stuff.
back in the days when i was doing windows desktop apps, this was the way. installshield was such a piece of hot enterprise garbage that felt like it was designed by management consultants. overengineered, way too complicated, way too many steps to do the simplest of things. it was literally a case study in how not to do software.
I used to do the CodeWarrior installer for Freescale/NXP embedded product lines in the 2010s and InstallShield became completely unworkable as a tool for a massive dev tool. Even today, a 400MB+ installer is difficult, let alone in the age of mechanical HDDs.
I had to choose between NSIS and Wix - and while native installer formats were clearly the future even back then, the performance and compression advantages of NSIS were so great that it was a clear choice. Solid LZMA was simply impossible to beat by any deflate/zlib/mszip oriented tool.
The joy of the dev team was palpable, the new installer was about 60% smaller and installed in one third the time.
I did installer stuff for about ~10 years, mostly InstallShield, deep in the weeds with Windows Installer table editing and custom actions, and making the InstallScript engine do things it wasn't designed for.
These days, I would personally use NSIS for small stuff. Wix installer for anything bigger/more enterprisey. Last I checked SharpDevelop's WYSIWYG editor was pretty decent for Wix dialogs.
Went down the Frenkel (Nullsoft founder) rabbit hole. Check out his forum where they've recently discussed AI bots scraping his forum [0]. Or his question submission page; he hasn't "left a reasonable question unanswered since 2009" [1]
> nothing specific against cloudflare, but the point of the internet is that it's decentralized and I'd hate to contribute against that (though we already do somewhat, hosting on aws etc). anyway our homegrown solution is working nicely these days! for now
- Justin January 2026
I always thought WASTE was so cool, but my family was pretty late get off of dialup to be able to actually use it. Sounds like it's still around in some form, do people actually use it nowadays?
WASTE became popular in our area just as LANning was ending its heyday. Even now I think the whole course of technology could have been altered if WASTE was utilised in a "corporate VPN" fashion, instead of the rise of Juniper routers and Sharepoint spaces, we could have had much simpler secure work-collaboration protocols.
We had a private network on campus circa 2010. Streaming was up and coming but not huge. Gnutella was great on the gigabit intranet. You could download entire HD movies in minutes where conventional torrents may be hours.
Gnutella is a mild obsession for me. The way that the protocol was designed and also the way that it saw a mainstream adoption has always fascinated me. For anyone reading this thread who is curious, I wrote a functional client this year for fun: https://github.com/RickCarlino/gnutella-bun-client/
It took a ton of work to keep the network clean. I did the gnutella.wego site back in the day. Gnutella was made when napster had 50 users and we all told him he was fcked. So gnutella was made to not use servers. Justin gave napster the code for song length and such to integrate with Napster.
Napster came along to the nullsoft channel one day and shared the app he was working on. We all played with it and offered suggestions. Told him he was be sued out of existence. From that came gnutella and waste. Something was spun out with me and friends as infrasearch and sold to sun. Wilson Sonsini did a good thing on peer-to-peer back in the day too. They were our lawyers. Sucked us dry.
Yes, Gene, Justin, Shawn all somewhat knew one another. Street raced and hung out online. I started infrasearch with Gene. He also did an open source shoutcast server.
For anyone who was also curious what Justin Frankel got up to after the speculation at the end of the article, he founded Cockos Software and is the lead developer on the excellent REAPER DAW.
Oh, I had no idea. It's been a few years since I used it in anger but it was a very pleasant package to use, with an extremely friendly licensing scheme (purchasing a permanent license for <current.X> got you all releases up until version <current+1.max>)
Not to mention it's about as easy to use without a license as WinRAR, so you can trial it indefinitely and then pay the mere $60 for it when you're ready to release some music commercially
Easily one of the best values in commercial software if you have a need for what it does. I think I paid something ~$70 a couple of years ago. While there's a limitation on the number of updates you get based on release version, I'm still getting updates under the license a couple years on. All that and you get a genuinely professional level tool for much less than what similar software from competitors offer.
I'm no musician but I paid for a Reaper license just because the software is so good and useful and the licensing scheme is so reasonable. Like, it's kind of hard to beat that.
This Frankel guy apparently had a hand in a lot of the tech that surrounded my youth. [0]
Looking back and looking forward I understand why software developers became these larger-than-life-or-at-least-an-incrementally-past-the-norm personalities in the late 20th/early 21st century. And I understand why people (particularly in the software development industry) feel so deeply about how technology influenced/s their lives.
The Information Age gave us direct involvement in the flow of information and the tide of culture. So many people...many of them barely adults, became involved in the social construction of the world around them. This probably isn't mind-blowing to most of you...but this is me coming to terms with this all in real time, right here, after silently writing a lot of users here as dorks detached from reality. I get it now. I'm surely simplifying some things too.
Anyway.
It's interesting how the level of agency and involvement that technology afforded society in the past has been straitened to accommodate corporations instead of to spite them.
[0]: Note to self—Nullsoft is not the company who made Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
Ah memory lane. I created the "speaker head" characters and lead the redesign of the WinAmp web site back in 2004. Good times. Through Odopod in San Francisco
That year range definitely surprised me. In my generation I suspect many of us think of winamp as being just sort of always there, but of course it wasn't. When you add it up, it really only existed for <25% of the history of the web (taking 1996 -> 2026 as the time range, I think 1996 is defensible start for when the web becaome accessible to some portion of people in the first world). Hell, I probably have coworkers who were born after the dissolution of nullsoft (interns anyway).
Oh god, I miss the information density of old articles. Especially contrasting with these kinds of pieces. Today, this one would be at least 5 times as long without a good reason. This was a breeze to read.
I am always confused when BigTechCos buy SmallCos and then unceremoniously kill them off fairly shortly after. I guess it's basically to cannibalize the source code?
The usual play is to acquire the customers and brand, with the team as a bonus.
Except for rare unique products, the source code might not matter at all. They're after the business, brand, and customers.
Having been in acquired SmallCos a couple times: There are always plans and justifications involving the products being acquired, but most don't survive impact with the acquiring company. People in a BigCo have their little fiefdoms established and everyone resists the sudden appearance of new developers and new code that weren't under their control. To be fair it goes both ways and the SmallCo developers who were previously in charge of everything don't like giving up control of parts of the system to the established teams and procedures in the BigCo.
> when BigTechCos buy SmallCos and then unceremoniously kill them off fairly shortly after
There's many reasons, but in general incompetence, malice and small crumbs problem.
I've done my small share of M&A DD work as an engineer, which was a lot of fun, but the results on my sanity and my outlook was bad.
On one hand, you get to go talk to a core founder of a company and they're entirely open to you picking their brain on "Why this" / "Did it pay off?" on pure eV math they did in their heads.
On the other, you see what happens after your recommendation and it is not within your control to change any of it.
Incompetence is generally "Please rewrite this software by our practices" devops hell or "Let's look for better customers for this product, ignore the old ones" in the ICP land. Google and dodgeball comes to mind.
Malice is more clear cut, where "Let's buy it and shut it down, so that we don't have a threat to our business" - I'm eagerly waiting to see what happens with Groq and Nvidia for example. AWS buying Groq would've been massively different. Classic case in point is Apple buying Fingerworks & shutting it down, but launching the iPhone.
Lastly, there's the small crumbs problem (or as it has been famously said "Do not anthropomorphize the lawn mower").
A company can get bought and the product doesn't really add great value to the buyer, beyond getting a few people who really know the space. The small number of people them gets redistributed into a neat set of existing reqs where they just accelerate the existing company's products based on that knowledge or in general fail to surface back to make a significant ripple in the future.
For example, I am wondering what will happen to Promptfoo after OpenAI.
It's because BigCo's tend toward decisions with dumb outcomes, while SmallCo's still benefit from the strategic direction of their founders. Although not a hard and fast rule, if you take a good look at where innovation occurs you'll often find the most successful products of big tech companies (after the initial one that made them big in the first place) came from acquisitions. Just look at Google's case: Android, YouTube, Maps, etc.
Sometimes the aquisition doesn't pan out as planned, or they were just after the talent or to snuff out a potential competitor / snag its customers (like Postini), or it was a dumb move in the first place and the numbers finally bore that out. BigCo's don't usually have the same determined, long-term dedication to their acquisitions as the people who the founded them, so you also see premature shedding of ventures that could have a ton of potential over time.
Source code is only useful when you want the actual product, which is the rare case. Most of the time they want the patents, naming rights or just customers.
This was during the dotcom bubble and AOL/Time Warner need to optically look like they were doing something relevant with the internet to justify their valuation. It was pure messaging, with a bit of killing a threat on the side.
It could just be a failed acquisition but an variant sometimes happens. OpenAI bought Statsig and then sold the Statsig brand and customer base to Amplitude.
For those who might not know:
> With Nullsoft gone and Frankel spending his time building a special-effects computer for his electric guitar...
I don't know what happened to the Jesusonic he was building then, but Justin Frankel ended up creating Reaper, the cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux digital audio workstation that is a solid Pro Tools competitor in a mere 16 MB download:
https://www.reaper.fm/
The installer for the whole DAW is smaller than most add-on VST effects. Some of my favorite albums have been recorded with Reaper, and obviously I'm a Reaper fan and use it too. Just like Winamp, you can pay for it, but if you really can't afford it, there's no time limit and it won't stop you from using it.
Showing my age here, but if you have a copy of the Walnut Creek CD-ROMs with demoscene archives, there's a demo by "Nullsoft" from pre-Winamp days hiding somewhere in there as well.
EDIT: Aww, fwirt beat me to it while I was typing! I guess I'll leave my comment here to add the Nullsoft demo mention. Found a link to his MSDOS demos here: https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1618
EDIT TWO: You can run his Ademo demo on archive.org, type "ademo 1" at the C:\ prompt in the web based DOSbox to run: https://archive.org/details/demoscene_Ademo-Nullsoft
I remember Reaper v2 being like a 4.7mb download at a time when nuendo/cubase/cakewalk/protools etc were >1GB plus samples. With a nicer summing engine and more stable, lower latency vst host than any of them. And the only one with a decent, revenue-dependent tiered license. What a legend.
Linux version of Reaper is 13mb today, if anything the contrast is more stark these days
REAPER is awesome! It has been my DAW of choice for 15 years now. It opens instantly, it's very fast and snappy and it practically never crashes.
I particularly like the concept that everything is just a track. In REAPER, tracks can be arbitrarily nested, they can contain all kinds of items and you can route signals between them.
You need a group? Just make a track and add other tracks to it.
You need a bus? Just a make track and send to it from other tracks.
You need an instrument track? Just add a VSTi to it.
You need a MIDI track? Just add a MIDI item.
In most other DAWs, these are all different things, for no good reason IMO.
It's a straight line from Jesusonic to Reaper: Jesusonic JSFX script is in Reaper, and there's a whole selection of stock JS plugins that come with it and it's actually quite easy to program.
I always figured JSFX was javascript :) I've used reaper and plenty of jsfx plugins for a long time, just never bothered to look under the hood.
Whoa TIL. Jsfx feels way cooler now. Fwiw jsfx is easy fodder for llm’s if you need a quick utility. Mine was a midi channel filter
I seem to recall he was also working on some software that allowed musicians to jam together over the internet, it somehow took advantage of inherent latency instead of just trying to minimize it.
Edit: found it: https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/
I've never used it, but it's a fascinating idea. The quirk is that no two participants, assuming they're each actually playing and not just listening, will hear the same thing. The following things happen simultaneously:
* Alice will play for X measures, while hearing what everyone else (including Bob) played X measures ago
* Bob will play for X measures, while hearing what everyone else (including Alice) played X measures ago
So for the measures mentioned above, Alice might conclude that things went very well, and Bob might conclude that things didn't jibe, and even if these were each true objective facts, they could both be correct as they are not discussing the same thing. There can be no retrospective discussion of a shared experience, only of individual experiences.
I used to use ninjam many years ago, I don't remember the delay being a deal breaker for me, it was just a fun way to practice with other players. If you found a good drummer you could just jam along and have fun with it.
Oh cool. I used to use Reaper to edit my podcast. Great program. Very easy to use even for a noob.
Glad to see a shout-out for Reaper in the first comments, its my favorite DAW and I've used them all.
And Reaper is currently a de-facto standard for game audio design.
> Reaper is currently a de-facto standard for game audio design
Such a wide and strong claim, I'm not sure there is a single de-facto choice specifically for "game audio design", I've seen most major DAWs, including Reaper, to be used for game audio. If anything is close to a de-facto standard in video game audio, it'd be Wwise and/or FMOD as audio middlewares, then whatever the artists happen to be familiar with for the actual production.
Unless you're talking about some specific genre here, either music- or game-wise?
From my experience, it’s very rare to see someone not using Reaper for sound design. Some use Pro Tools or Cubase, but they aren’t as common as Reaper. It really has no competition due to how easy it is to prepare dozens of assets with a single render (all with correct naming and loudness) as well as extensions that add features no other DAW has (e.g. Global Sampler, stuff by LKC Tools, etc.).
It’s not very good for music, though, so here, the situation is a bit more diverse. So yes, I’m talking concretely about sound design.
I think now it seems clear you're talking about "sound effect design" specifically maybe, rather than sound design? Particularly because you say it's not good for music production, but plenty of us do sound design together with music product, but I've also never done sound effect design, which it does sound like you're talking about.
Harmonix uses REAPER for authoring Rock Band and Fortnite Festival charts and syncing them to the stems
Additionally to Winamp, I guess what I will always remember Nullsoft with is also "NSIS - Nullsoft Scriptable Install System" [0]. In a previous job I sat down, read the docs and wrote a Windows-Installer for our product using this thing, since management didn't want to pay for InstallShield.
What made quite an impression on me back then was the fact that the scripting language somewhat resembles assembly. [1] Also, NSIS had/has a tool called "NSIS Dialog Designer" which I used to design the Installer forms.
It was quite the fun experience and I'm pleasantly surprised that NSIS is supported to this day [2].
0 - https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Main_Page
1 - https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Check_whether_your_application_i...
2 - https://github.com/NSIS-Dev/nsis
Yep, NSIS is awesome and my team is still using it to package Windows builds of at least two apps. I was pleasantly surprised to see Tauri [0] includes NSIS as one of its built-in installer options.
0 - https://tauri.app/ 1 - https://tauri.app/distribute/windows-installer/
My first IT job in the late aughts we had a small windows utility that came packaged in a zip file rather than an installer, and we wanted to deploy it across the network. I figured out what registry keys the .exe needed and created a NSIS installer that could be run silently, quickly, and remotely - fun stuff.
back in the days when i was doing windows desktop apps, this was the way. installshield was such a piece of hot enterprise garbage that felt like it was designed by management consultants. overengineered, way too complicated, way too many steps to do the simplest of things. it was literally a case study in how not to do software.
I worked with both Installshield and NSIS and vastly prefered the latter, it just got the job done.
I used to do the CodeWarrior installer for Freescale/NXP embedded product lines in the 2010s and InstallShield became completely unworkable as a tool for a massive dev tool. Even today, a 400MB+ installer is difficult, let alone in the age of mechanical HDDs.
I had to choose between NSIS and Wix - and while native installer formats were clearly the future even back then, the performance and compression advantages of NSIS were so great that it was a clear choice. Solid LZMA was simply impossible to beat by any deflate/zlib/mszip oriented tool.
The joy of the dev team was palpable, the new installer was about 60% smaller and installed in one third the time.
I did installer stuff for about ~10 years, mostly InstallShield, deep in the weeds with Windows Installer table editing and custom actions, and making the InstallScript engine do things it wasn't designed for.
These days, I would personally use NSIS for small stuff. Wix installer for anything bigger/more enterprisey. Last I checked SharpDevelop's WYSIWYG editor was pretty decent for Wix dialogs.
Went down the Frenkel (Nullsoft founder) rabbit hole. Check out his forum where they've recently discussed AI bots scraping his forum [0]. Or his question submission page; he hasn't "left a reasonable question unanswered since 2009" [1]
> nothing specific against cloudflare, but the point of the internet is that it's decentralized and I'd hate to contribute against that (though we already do somewhat, hosting on aws etc). anyway our homegrown solution is working nicely these days! for now - Justin January 2026
[0] https://www.1014.org/index.php?article=930#cl3
[1] https://www.askjf.com/
My favorite Nullsoft software that came out the end of this era was WASTE [1].
Peer-to-peer (back when P2P was all the rage), encrypted, decentralized private networks.
Group of friends and I used it post-college as a way to share files and chat, and was much better than AIM or other instant messaging at the time.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE
I always thought WASTE was so cool, but my family was pretty late get off of dialup to be able to actually use it. Sounds like it's still around in some form, do people actually use it nowadays?
WASTE became popular in our area just as LANning was ending its heyday. Even now I think the whole course of technology could have been altered if WASTE was utilised in a "corporate VPN" fashion, instead of the rise of Juniper routers and Sharepoint spaces, we could have had much simpler secure work-collaboration protocols.
WASTE introduced me to Thomas Pynchon. Thank you Justin!
Publishing Gnutella while being acquired by a greedy media company was such a baller move.
The network still lives, even today. This is so underrated.
We had a private network on campus circa 2010. Streaming was up and coming but not huge. Gnutella was great on the gigabit intranet. You could download entire HD movies in minutes where conventional torrents may be hours.
Gnutella is a mild obsession for me. The way that the protocol was designed and also the way that it saw a mainstream adoption has always fascinated me. For anyone reading this thread who is curious, I wrote a functional client this year for fun: https://github.com/RickCarlino/gnutella-bun-client/
It took a ton of work to keep the network clean. I did the gnutella.wego site back in the day. Gnutella was made when napster had 50 users and we all told him he was fcked. So gnutella was made to not use servers. Justin gave napster the code for song length and such to integrate with Napster.
I remember the early gnutella releases and we'd use the search history as a chatroom for the first like 24 hours before it got too saturated ;)
Have you blogged about this or written it down? I would love to hear more about this piece of history and it seems that the history is slowly fading.
Napster came along to the nullsoft channel one day and shared the app he was working on. We all played with it and offered suggestions. Told him he was be sued out of existence. From that came gnutella and waste. Something was spun out with me and friends as infrasearch and sold to sun. Wilson Sonsini did a good thing on peer-to-peer back in the day too. They were our lawyers. Sucked us dry.
Oh man infrasearch. With Gene Kan right? Was trying to revive xcf at Berkeley with some friends.
Yes, Gene, Justin, Shawn all somewhat knew one another. Street raced and hung out online. I started infrasearch with Gene. He also did an open source shoutcast server.
Wow, what's the go-to client these days?
GTK Gnutella or Shareazza seems to be the norm.
For anyone who was also curious what Justin Frankel got up to after the speculation at the end of the article, he founded Cockos Software and is the lead developer on the excellent REAPER DAW.
Oh, I had no idea. It's been a few years since I used it in anger but it was a very pleasant package to use, with an extremely friendly licensing scheme (purchasing a permanent license for <current.X> got you all releases up until version <current+1.max>)
Not to mention it's about as easy to use without a license as WinRAR, so you can trial it indefinitely and then pay the mere $60 for it when you're ready to release some music commercially
Easily one of the best values in commercial software if you have a need for what it does. I think I paid something ~$70 a couple of years ago. While there's a limitation on the number of updates you get based on release version, I'm still getting updates under the license a couple years on. All that and you get a genuinely professional level tool for much less than what similar software from competitors offer.
I couldn't more highly recommend it.
I'm no musician but I paid for a Reaper license just because the software is so good and useful and the licensing scheme is so reasonable. Like, it's kind of hard to beat that.
This Frankel guy apparently had a hand in a lot of the tech that surrounded my youth. [0]
Looking back and looking forward I understand why software developers became these larger-than-life-or-at-least-an-incrementally-past-the-norm personalities in the late 20th/early 21st century. And I understand why people (particularly in the software development industry) feel so deeply about how technology influenced/s their lives.
The Information Age gave us direct involvement in the flow of information and the tide of culture. So many people...many of them barely adults, became involved in the social construction of the world around them. This probably isn't mind-blowing to most of you...but this is me coming to terms with this all in real time, right here, after silently writing a lot of users here as dorks detached from reality. I get it now. I'm surely simplifying some things too.
Anyway.
It's interesting how the level of agency and involvement that technology afforded society in the past has been straitened to accommodate corporations instead of to spite them.
[0]: Note to self—Nullsoft is not the company who made Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
Ah memory lane. I created the "speaker head" characters and lead the redesign of the WinAmp web site back in 2004. Good times. Through Odopod in San Francisco
https://x.com/WebDesignMuseum/status/1700520818478854523
As a teenager I spent a ton of time on this website, specifically the skins directory
winamp 2.77 for lyfe
That year range definitely surprised me. In my generation I suspect many of us think of winamp as being just sort of always there, but of course it wasn't. When you add it up, it really only existed for <25% of the history of the web (taking 1996 -> 2026 as the time range, I think 1996 is defensible start for when the web becaome accessible to some portion of people in the first world). Hell, I probably have coworkers who were born after the dissolution of nullsoft (interns anyway).
Oh god, I miss the information density of old articles. Especially contrasting with these kinds of pieces. Today, this one would be at least 5 times as long without a good reason. This was a breeze to read.
Indeed!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559415
I am always confused when BigTechCos buy SmallCos and then unceremoniously kill them off fairly shortly after. I guess it's basically to cannibalize the source code?
The usual play is to acquire the customers and brand, with the team as a bonus.
Except for rare unique products, the source code might not matter at all. They're after the business, brand, and customers.
Having been in acquired SmallCos a couple times: There are always plans and justifications involving the products being acquired, but most don't survive impact with the acquiring company. People in a BigCo have their little fiefdoms established and everyone resists the sudden appearance of new developers and new code that weren't under their control. To be fair it goes both ways and the SmallCo developers who were previously in charge of everything don't like giving up control of parts of the system to the established teams and procedures in the BigCo.
> when BigTechCos buy SmallCos and then unceremoniously kill them off fairly shortly after
There's many reasons, but in general incompetence, malice and small crumbs problem.
I've done my small share of M&A DD work as an engineer, which was a lot of fun, but the results on my sanity and my outlook was bad.
On one hand, you get to go talk to a core founder of a company and they're entirely open to you picking their brain on "Why this" / "Did it pay off?" on pure eV math they did in their heads.
On the other, you see what happens after your recommendation and it is not within your control to change any of it.
Incompetence is generally "Please rewrite this software by our practices" devops hell or "Let's look for better customers for this product, ignore the old ones" in the ICP land. Google and dodgeball comes to mind.
Malice is more clear cut, where "Let's buy it and shut it down, so that we don't have a threat to our business" - I'm eagerly waiting to see what happens with Groq and Nvidia for example. AWS buying Groq would've been massively different. Classic case in point is Apple buying Fingerworks & shutting it down, but launching the iPhone.
Lastly, there's the small crumbs problem (or as it has been famously said "Do not anthropomorphize the lawn mower").
A company can get bought and the product doesn't really add great value to the buyer, beyond getting a few people who really know the space. The small number of people them gets redistributed into a neat set of existing reqs where they just accelerate the existing company's products based on that knowledge or in general fail to surface back to make a significant ripple in the future.
For example, I am wondering what will happen to Promptfoo after OpenAI.
It's because BigCo's tend toward decisions with dumb outcomes, while SmallCo's still benefit from the strategic direction of their founders. Although not a hard and fast rule, if you take a good look at where innovation occurs you'll often find the most successful products of big tech companies (after the initial one that made them big in the first place) came from acquisitions. Just look at Google's case: Android, YouTube, Maps, etc.
Sometimes the aquisition doesn't pan out as planned, or they were just after the talent or to snuff out a potential competitor / snag its customers (like Postini), or it was a dumb move in the first place and the numbers finally bore that out. BigCo's don't usually have the same determined, long-term dedication to their acquisitions as the people who the founded them, so you also see premature shedding of ventures that could have a ton of potential over time.
Source code is only useful when you want the actual product, which is the rare case. Most of the time they want the patents, naming rights or just customers.
This was during the dotcom bubble and AOL/Time Warner need to optically look like they were doing something relevant with the internet to justify their valuation. It was pure messaging, with a bit of killing a threat on the side.
Their whole business model at the time seemed to be "making dubious acquisitions".
They lost money on every transaction but intended to make it up with volume.
It's how The System kills something it wants dead without triggering Streisand Effect and creating a huge backlash. It punishes with success.
It could just be a failed acquisition but an variant sometimes happens. OpenAI bought Statsig and then sold the Statsig brand and customer base to Amplitude.
Not complicated. Thing shows banner ads. Only makes money when expenses are zero.
sometimes it's an acquisition of some product and sometimes it's to explicitly to kill off the thing without concern for any product.
Eh, I think that does happen but is much less likely then either acquihiring or killing a potential competitor.
The want the: developers, IP, customers, to kill some competition, or some combination.
they want a popular thing, then that thing falls under the control of Big Business Meeting Thinking , and suffers the expected fate
Looking back at this, has there been a maverick company like Nullsoft since then? It's sad, but AOL may have killed off the last one.
Not a "company" but the SQLite story gives me maverick vibes.
https://sqlite.org/consortium.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSVgeMoXJTs
Really whips the llama's ass.
Winamp! My first experience of listening to serious music from computer.
A community version survives to this day:
https://getwacup.com/
I was part of this pre-aol and after. Good times! We all still hang out on an IRC server.
I use NSIS for the Windows installer of TXR. Does the job.
/me also keylogged teacher's computer. shortly though as I quickly learned how shitty behavior that was
It's a shame some of those other names mentioned didn't wind up fading into obscurity.
Winamp still the best.
it really does that llama thing
nice advertiser friendly self censoring there :P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBY52n7luM8