The VCs are willingly fleeced - they aren't about companies generating revenue either. Hard to feel sorry for VCs when they're playing the same game Kite is - just hyping the market and flipping an asset, hoping the music doesn't stop before they get out.
Because the incident should be fresh and impactful enough to remember, from my point of view it almost reach levels as bad as Sourceforge adware injection in open source software installers.
For a recap for people who weren't in the industry or have short memory.
Kite took ownership of some popular code editor plugins and injected some adware/tracking code.
One thing I wondered about the whole story about Tesla engineers reviewing code was… how many of them and how much time would it take for them to understand organizationally who is needed / knows what to do for a site like Twitter?
Is “I think this codes is not optimally written.” Even useful after a week?
I once was a part of an acquisition where they quickly fired a lot of redundant people.
Including the entire mailroom, dock workers, facilities staff.
After a week they randomly called the tech support number and a group of us who had never been to the dock struggled to open the door for a weeks worth of deliveries.
Trivial in a small, no-nonsense company, probably absolutely non-trivial in a place like Twitter, where I expect they have a custom, byzantine devops/config management solution in place.
TomTom like Here and Garmin are fighting to try to stay relevant in a market that has been seized by Android Auto and CarPlay.
The issue is the car vendors do not want to surrender their navigation and entertainment to Google and Apple as navigation system options at >$1500 and ongoing updates are precious margin and recurring revenue that they all desire.
With Android Auto or CarPlay they give that all up.
They are both dead men walking but like to do a full court press like this every few years to remind us all they still have the lights on.
I don’t think you have read the article. TomTom is changing from navigation device maker, to map maker. They already did that, Apple Maps uses TomTom data for example. There is however a new market that will grow: autonomous driving vehicles. These need more data, and more or less real time if available.
We've had 5 such approaches in the past 6 weeks of which 2 we have taken over.
It is going to get very very bad inside the next 6 months. We're still in the pre-swell phase before the tidal wave hits.