Automattic has a big plan for the future of messaging with the acquisition of Beeper
What Made Beeper Work? Eric Migicovsky, CEO and Co-Founder of Beeper Mini, the Beeper-Apple, Messages App
Eric Migicovsky, Beeper’s CEO, tells me not to take the timing as an admission of failure — that Beeper couldn’t do what it wanted, so it gave up and sold out. Instead, he says, this is about Beeper finding a better and more sustainable way to get where it always wanted to go: a single app that combines messaging services, that turns messaging into a people-first system instead of a platform-first one. “Having worked on this for three and a half years,” he says, “and seeing how difficult it is to bring something like this to life, we’ve realized we need to know who our friends are in this game.” Automattic was an early investor in Beeper, and is a good steward of its acquisitions. To Migicovsky, it felt like the right place to land.
There’s a fascinating backstory here on all sides of this acquisition. For Beeper, it comes a couple of months after Beeper launched a new app called Beeper Mini that found a way to let Android users tap into the iMessage protocol and become blue bubbles in the Messages app. Apple didn’t like that; the two sides played a cat-and-mouse game for a while, and eventually, Beeper just gave up. The antitrust complaint against Apple contains mention of that fight.
The CEO of Automattic has been saying for months that messaging is the next pillar of the company. With WordPress projects, Automattic helps oversee something like half the websites on the internet. There is a powerful player in online retail. Mullenweg told me that he saw another chance to work on something just as important, as well as with messaging. “Messaging is communication, and communication is fundamental to the human condition,” he said. Private, free, secured, open source communication is a fundamental human right.
Beeper was founded by Brad Murray and his friend, Migicovsky. The founder of a company that focused on open source software and innovative use of an E-ink display had previously founded a company that appealed to the nerd crowd. (The Beeper deal is, by all accounts, a better outcome than the Pebble acquisition in 2016, when the flailing smartwatch company was sold to Fitbit.)
