Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud
Sounds good. I was an early Etsy seller, as a glass artist and bead vendor, As well as a developer who worked with them as closely as I could for a few years.<p>They have always seemed a bit disconnected from their customers. The first regime, Rob Kalin, Haim and Revolving Dork, had an age and culture disconnect from most of their customers. The next group, headed by Chad Dickerson and Allspaw, seemed like they wanted to focus on technology for technology’s sake, more than what Etsy was actually doing with that as a company. They even made some statements to the effect of how they wanted Etsy to be known as a technology company, like Facebook, and be a platform, like Amazon.<p>All fine and good, but so far, what all of the leaders of Etsy have had in common is that they don’t really understand what it’s like to be a micro business person selling handmade art online. If I was an investor, I wouldn’t want to be paying for a bunch of guys to experiment with Mongo DB search engines and shards. As long as they’re still not understanding their core business, it’s a distraction.<p>Etsy should be focused on one thing: connecting buyers and sellers of handmade art with each other.