Bidness

So I found out late last night that my biggest client just got bought out by their biggest competitor.

The irony is that what I’ve been working on for them lately has all been centered around this big user conference they’re staging next week: they’re flying all their customers to Chicago, giving them a sales pitch or two, filling them with liquor, and showing them goofy videos like this one (that would be Dave Mills, their lead engineer. And yes, goofy as it is I’m rather pleased with the effects work if I do say so myself).

And my next task was supposed to be a design pass on the main presenter’s powerpoint deck, which I’d kind of been wondering why he hadn’t sent it to me yet except in little bits and pieces, and gee he sure seemed a little preoccupied lately, wasn’t answering emails as quickly as usual, I guess he’s really busy with prep work — in general I just completely failed to clue in to the fact that this was not so much going to be a “rah rah aren’t we wonderful” meeting as a “hey customers don’t freak out just because the product line we sold you is going to evaporate once our former competitor gets hold of it” meeting.

Sigh.

No idea yet whether the guys who are worth working for are going to stick around or find other things to do. I suspect they’ll move on. I know I would. Building new products is Cool. Wrestling an existing codebase around until it can be subsumed into a different product is decidedly Not Cool.

(Irony #2 is that ANGEL made their annual pass at hiring me full-time not too long ago, and I turned them down as usual... I wonder how much of a windfall I just missed out on — again?)