Focus is hard, painful work.
It's especially difficult to let go of things you really care about in order to focus on the things you care about more.
But to keep our idealism, we need to grow up sometimes.
We’ve decided to close And Bang so that we can put all our efforts into Talky, Otalk, and our services (realtime consulting and training).
And Bang was one of the first products we ever built and represents several years of effort by our team. I vividly remember finishing the And Bang 1.0 signup UI and landing page in a hotel room with Henrik the night before the first Keeping it Realtime Conference in 2011.
As a company financially driven mostly by service revenue, it is very hard to invest heavily enough in both open source and products—and extremely hard when they go in different directions, technology-wise. Last May, we decided that we would not ship a paid version of And Bang, and would transition it to a new version of the product built on top of Otalk before doing so.
We aimed to keep And Bang alive, but we stopped development on it entirely, putting that energy into components of Otalk. But even keeping it in that state meant a certain amount of complexity, and some guilt over leaving it languishing.
After some hard conversations this Fall, we decided to end the product entirely, close the servers in two weeks (November 21, 2014), and redirect our available energy into fewer, clearer channels of effort.
We believe in the direction we’re going with Talky and Otalk. They really matter to us, and we believe they can help others, and fit into our vision.
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