Bricklin on Technology

6.5. How Blogging Helped Blogger

As you can see, I like blogging and have felt for a long time that it is an important form of communication.

There was a time when the Blogger service was having financial difficulties. The last remaining employee, Evan Williams, wrote about their situation on his blog in a post titled "And Then There Was One."^[] He started out like this:

^[] http://web.archive.org/web/20010410030419/www.evhead.com/longer/2200706_essays.asp

It's probably become obvious to the careful observer that all is not well in the Land of Pyra. Rather than wait for the public speculation and debate, I'm going to say what exactly is going on (from my perspective—not speaking for anyone else on the team or as an official Pyra/Blogger representative). I'm sure the public speculation and debate will happen anyway, but I don't plan to take much part in it. I have other things to do.

First of all, the company (Pyra) is not dead, and the service (Blogger) is not going away. However: We are out of money, and I have lost my team.

Evan Williams, January 31, 2001

Dave Winer linked to it in his blog, which brought it to my attention. Here is the account I later posted about what then transpired.

HOW THE BLOGGER DEAL HAPPENED On April 16, 2001, Trellix and Pyra announced a relationship. (You can read the press release at danbricklin.com/log/bloggerrelease.htm.) Here's my story behind it. Some background: Back in 1985, the company I founded that created VisiCalc, Software Arts, was in ...