Panic Inc. has just retired its most famous piece of software, the venerable Mac audio player and encoderAudion.
Retired. Not withdrawn from the market, or sold to AvariceCorp, but just… retired. It’s now free for the downloading, and includes a whole slew of features you won’t find in its main competitor.
But along with retirement comes a remarkably frank biography, covering Audion’s full life cycle from its birth as part of a larger, never-realized package of applications. It’s excellent reading, culminating with a dramatic meeting in an Apple boardroom:
Jobs wanted to know how big we were, and how long we’ve been doing this. He wanted to know a few more things that I can’t even really remember. I remember he asked, “Do you have any other ideas for apps you want to work on?” I replied, genuinely, “Well, we’ve got an idea for a digital photo management program…” and he replied with a simple, “Yeah. Don’t do that one.”
The most remarkable thing about the piece is just how sympathetically it paints nearly every antagonist and competitor Panic faced. (The ruthless behemoth AOL is the exception.) It’s the story of staying true to yourself and your vision, and of being content with that choice even when you realize what you’ve passed up.
