I was contacted by someone I highly respected a couple of years ago, who spent half an hour half an hour telling me that he thought I was doing great things with Tarsnap, and everybody at his office thought I was amazing and wished they could work more closely with me... and it was only after hanging up the phone that I realized that he was probably trying to find out if I was interested in selling the company.
You seem to support my point with your story. You said you thought they were interested in buying you at the end of it. Are there other reasons you've encountered, where competitors wanted to talk and there was another purpose behind it?
At one startup we sold access to our kick-ass CMS to another web design shop on a per-project basis. They got better tech and won more bids, we got to amortize our R&D costs over more projects. I doubt we ever lost even a single customer to them. There were tens of competitors just in our city, and they were targeting slightly more upscale customers anyway. Pure win/win.
When I sold consulting and support for an open source compiler, of course I talked with the guys doing the same for a competing compiler for the same language. Even though both our main customer was the same company. (Who slightly dysfunctionally were using both compilers for different projects). Why not?
Right now I work for a telecoms system supplier. It's always completely unclear what the overlap between our system and another supplier's is. So it's totally worthwhile to talk to them and figure things out. You never know what the outcome will be. They really could be a direct competitor. They could pat us on the back and say "that's so cute, we started out that way a decade ago". We could be complementary enough to cooperate of RFPs. They could want to license the technology and integrate it to their system. Or, yes, they could want to buy the company. It would be insane not to talk with these people just on the fear of wasting half an hour because you don't want to be acquired.
I believe this happened to Justin Kan when he visited Google with Kiko. They just wanted to know his numbers, and then they ended up building the product.
Could you expand on this a bit? It's the first time I read that phrase - it could be because English isn't my first language. What do you mean with 'hand wavers', people complimenting you on your work without making concrete offers / becoming customers?
I felt the need to correct the stats since they were part of a point I was making. The data I cited doesn't look at a certain group of web sites specifically, which skews the data.
Bottom line, I think it would have been better if you had just done one post that stuck to only disputing the data with your own sources, and left the idea of an acquisition out of it. That would have been walking straight ahead, paying no attention to them.
