Companies purchase other companies all the time. Sometimes it’s because they just want to get rid of the competition, and sometimes it’s because they want the company and the product that they’re selling, and sometimes because the other company would complement their current business very well.
According to a recent report, it seems that Twitter has recently acquired a password security startup called Mitro earlier this week, making it the second acquisition Twitter has made this week when they acquired Madbits. For those unfamiliar, Mitro is a password manager that allows users to share certain passwords with specified groups of people.
For example if you had a document that you only wanted certain people to have access to, then you would password protect that document and use Mitro to share that password with that group of users. To help make it secure, Mitro uses encryption to make sure that the passwords are kept safe.
Interestingly enough instead of applying the technology or integrating the service with Twitter, the company has instead transitioned the product into open-source project. A message on Mitro’s website reads, “As of today, we are releasing all of Mitro’s server and client code under the GPL license on Github.”
Based on this it sounds like Twitter’s interest in Mitro might be for its talent, not so much the product. In some ways it reminds us of Apple’s recent acquisition of Beats and where they are planning to let go about a third of Beats’ workforce once the acquisition has been completed.
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