p2pnet.net News:- Everyone thought it was wierd when AOL scarfed up Winamp.

Well, not wierd, exactly, but what was it going to do with it? How would it turn the application into gazillions of dollars? “The marriage of Nullsoft and AOL was always one of discontent,” as BetaNews points out.

“After AOL acquired the small company in 1999 for around $100 million, the young team of Winamp developers was assimilated into a strict corporate culture that begged for rebellion,” it goes on. “Although Nullsoft was initially given a long leash by AOL, it wasn’t long until the two ideologies collided.”

Nullsoft founder and Winamp creator Justin Frankel and his team, “were accustomed to simply brainstorming ideas over coffee and bringing them to the masses without approval,” says the story.

“So when Frankel and fellow Nullsoft developer Tom Pepper devised a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system, dubbed Gnutella, parent AOL was left in the dark.”

That’s where AOL, which has just announced that becoming a multiple personality will help it to prosper, has been ever since.

Now, the last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, says BetaNews.

And that, in turn, signals Winamp’s imminent demise, says the report, although AOL says Winamp is, “a thriving product that AOL continues to support and will continue to support.”

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See:-
corporate culture – Death Knell Sounds for Nullsoft, Winamp, November 10, 2004
multiple personality – AOL split in four, p2pnet, November 9, 2004

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