280 North wowed people with the creation of their web application framework Cappuccino, which is built on an impressive new programming language, Objective-J. The whole framework is modelled on desktop development with Objective-C for Mac OS X, and it can do some pretty amazing stuff – it’s like Cocoa but for the web.

Techcrunch report that 280 North has been acquired by Motorola for a whopping $20 million, quoting a Motorola spokesperson:

“I can confirm that Motorola acquired 280 North earlier this summer. The transaction provides Motorola with specialized web-app engineering talent and technology that will help facilitate the continued expansion of Motorola’s application ecosystem. We believe 280 North will be instrumental in helping us continue to foster the Android ecosystem with innovative web-based technologies and applications.”

I really don’t understand the logic behind this acquisition, and suspect it could mean the end of the great open-source work that 280 North have done.

  1. Motorola are committed to developing for the Android platform, so why acquire technology which is so intrinsically tied to the Mac platform? Objective-J is essentially a webified version of Objective-C; the look-and-feel of Cappuccino’s UI elements are based on the Mac UI, and the development tools feel just like Mac apps.
  2. Cappuccino’s aim was to bring the ease of developing desktop applications to the web: it’s about creating web applications which feel like desktop applications. Motorola have very firmly positioned themselves in the mobile market, so why the interest in web applications which feel like desktop applications? Even if they are branching out into the development of tablet devices for the home, surely it makes sense to develop technology for a touch UI? Touch is not what Cappuccino is about – Sproutcore is way ahead of the game in this area.

I’m ready to be proven wrong, but this seems like a knee-jerk acquisition. This isn’t about acquiring 280 North as a viable company, or Cappuccino as a platform for further development – it’s about acquiring the clever brains behind this web app framework for Motorola’s bespoke purposes. It’s right there in that Motorola statement: “the transaction provides Motorola with specialized web-app engineering talent”.

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