Fable is winding down(fable.app) |
Fable is winding down(fable.app) |
> We recommend you look through your Fable files and export your projects off the platform (e.g. to mp4, gif, lottie… etc).
I genuinely am at a loss for words here. Somebody sat down and decided that giving you your project sources in some form is too much work, just a GIF export will do.
(For those looking to save their data: go for Lottie, it’s a bit more versatile and you can preserve vector data at least.)
EDIT: the ideal way to go here would of course be open sourcing the whole thing!
We can lament the current state of affairs, but let's not pretend it's abnormal.
Self-funded sustainable businesses can be much more stable in the long term.
Have we all become so fragile that something as minor as a startup with a small number of users shutting down causes us shock and disgust?
> This type of reaction should be reserved for real catastrophes like a cancer diagnosis, a war, the death of a loved one, etc.
Why are you on here lecturing us? Shouldn't you be out saving the world or something important? Or at least lecturing politicians?
When a product shuts down it's usually because it wasn't profitable (or not profitable enough). Either they didn't get enough paying customers or they set their pricing too low. For whatever reason- but there's probably some correlation between a product shutting down and many people not being aware of its existence.
Even without being well known, these stories can hit the front page if a few people upvote a post quickly, and then the post gets a few sympathy votes as it rises up the page.
I don't think profit plays a big role.
“However, by the time we started to take Fable to market, AI was beginning to challenge the very nature of software itself, and our multi-modal bet with Prism wasn’t enough to cut through. And while we hold a strong pov on how the next generation of creative workflows should evolve, unfortunately, we don’t have the time to get there.”
Failed AI bet?
So frustrating as a user.
Everything as SaaS web apps is just yet another chapter in the enshittification of tech.
Hiring a contracting company for 3 mo per year to perform updates.
My guess is the decision maker doesn’t think it’s worth their time to run a business like this. Instead of rapidly shifting focus into a higher growth area, they would continue to be attached to a shrinking product
No it didn't. ChatGPT spitting out snippets of broken shit where you have to tell it exactly what you want and think through the entire architecture yourself is not a challenge to the nature of software. Especially older models that were even worse than the current 2024 ones.
Also, AI-generated code is still code. The underlying hardware still works the same.
* Please open source it! *
This is the best conclusion for everybody involved.
Patent indemnification is not your problem, it's the problem of whoever wants to use the code.
> You must be 18 years of age or older and reside in the United States or any of its territories to use the Services
In hindsight, excluding 95.3% of the world from using their product may have been a mistake.
Why wouldn't they use that to sell another round to bridge?
To get to the point: I didn't find anything that looked usable. Maybe it's telling that I didn't find Fable/Prism at all. But from what I can make of their site, it seems to be about adding (to my eye, unpleasant and unnecessary) textures, rather than generating new animations.
This looked like a nice piece of software with a lot of functionality and a meaningful customer base. It sucks that everything is grow, grow, grow, grow, exit, or die. I've been contemplating starting something, but I don't know if there's any oxygen left for the idea of simply making something people want and selling/operating it at a reasonable profit.
They focused on the wrong thing, spent too much money and decided to call it quits.
I mean, you're closing down cause you ran out of cash right? But apparently the app is beloved by customers... right?
Something about AI (which seems somewhat vague...)
Anyway, why not just be honest? We swung for the fences, didn't quite get there, the money is all gone, and no-one wants yo give us more...
Frankly as post mortems go, this one is pretty weak.
Erlang, FoundationDB, there's plenty of success stories of products who were EOL at some point and open sourcing was the thing that made them explode in popularity.
I think Fable is a very-high quality product, it's unfortunate it didn't materialize as a business, but the software has enough quality and popularity to maybe become something like the Blender of that niche; a thing that would be extremely beneficial to any of the founders' future endeavors.
Although, as I think about it, maybe as an AI company nobody ever expected them to ever get to profitability so the only way to continue their existence was through continued funding.
You found a company and own 100%. You get investment and bring on partners, you set aside 20% for employee shares, etc. All of a sudden there's a dozen owners and nobody owns 50%. You're profitable in the sense that everyone's payroll clears and you're making rent, with money left over, but it's not enough to invest in anything big, and the investors won't put up anything more because your growth has stalled.
Every investor who was previously your "partner" will be trying to shut the company down and sell it for parts.
VCs don't make their money by having a portfolio of companies throwing off $200k/yr in profit to a dozen different investors.
Isn't this fine as long as this is the only thing it does?
"Making sure this has been paid for" seems completely legitimate.
Sometimes you get a riff format and a big chunk of the guesswork is solved.
And most modern formats are just a bunch of xml files inside a tar.gz , so now the first step is to change the extension to .zip and cross your fingers.
Can even grow at a progressive pace by expanding into adjacent segments: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211024
Most people (as in 99.9%) don't give a shit about venture capital and don't follow it at all. I would guess that most people (as in >50%) couldn't even give you a half-way accurate definition of it.
If you're buying enterprise software you're more likely to know that VC exists but you're not any more likely to care about it. None of the people writing 5-7 figure enterprise software checks are tracking which VCs are at which firm when, and who invested in what, and what company had a negative client impact when, and all that. And even if you were tracking it what are the odds that you'll need the same software 5 or 10 years later when it might be relevant to the decision?
Things evolve based on evolutionary pressures only and the VC world is too disconnected from its negative impacts to feel any pressure from them.
Put another way, credibility (from the standpoint of the customer) does not positively or negatively impact a VC in any way.
The highly credible VCs should be able to positively influence the negotiated pricing, at least by association.
VCs care about their returns. They get returns by selling the company to the next entity in line — a strategic acquirer, an acqui-hire acquirer, or through an IPO. To maximize their returns, they insist on maximizing growth, specifically user base growth. And when they sell, the acquiring entity usually ruins the experience for users, shuts down the business, or both.
I think the biggest issue would be the most "successful" VCs aka the ones that make the most money, have the most money to invest in other companies.
If they can make the most return on their investment by fucking over customers than they would have a greater impact.
I suppose if we had the ability to "pierce the VC veil" we could see who the main VCs are and choose weather or not to use a product based on their track record.
For one thing, it's origin-private, so take a guess how well that works when the company owning the DNS records for that origin goes out of business.
(There's also the issue with actually having an executable that can just run without any external dependencies)
> when the company owning the DNS records for that origin goes out of business.
Likely not a problem. Local data in OPFS is synced with a remote server for collaboration reasons anyway.
> There's also the issue with actually having an executable that can just run without any external dependencies
Assume you target the browser as OS, then it's already possible to have an executable: Run the JS file that renders a UI. Related: We will likely have an app launcher demo soon for https://lix.opral.com/
What doesn't work in Safari and Firefox is (non sandboxed) access to the files of a user. OPFS is sandboxed.
you don't have to retain qualified engineers b/c you hire a contracting company that manages employee growth within their own organization.
But even if everyone was clueless, the seller will still likely present such information to the buyer to justify not providing discounts.
I've done this job for a 3-4 startups before. they can't afford a full time engineer, so they hire someone to work part-time to keep the lights on. its not a hard job and many engineers appreciate the consistent work and extra cash.