Losing a key executive is bad enough. Losing a key executive responsible for key elements of your strategy is worse. Losing a key executive with broad strategic responsibility because said executive thinks a competitor's tech is better? Time to run for the exits.
According to TechCrunch, Zynga (Nasdaq: ZNGA) has lost CTO Laurent Desegur to start-up Game Closure because its technology for creating mobile games is apparently too awesome to ignore.
"I vote with my feet. After first-hand experience with the Game Closure SDK and the people behind it, I knew that I had [to] be involved in the growth and refinement of the team and technology," Desegur told TechCrunch.
To be fair, he isn't slamming Zynga per se. But there's at least a hint of faint praise. After seeing the technology and evaluating it against what he had been working on -- specifically, directing all of Zynga's engineering efforts -- Desegur decided to make a move.
In good company?
Interestingly, Zynga and Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) were also interested in Game Closure. TechCrunch says each company made bids for the start-up, which chose instead to take $12 million in new funding from a group of venture capital firms.
Right now, that looks like the right move. Shares of Facebook and Zynga are crashing even as Game Closure is gaining interest for a development kit (i.e., the "SDK" referred to above) written in Javascript that allows coders to write and distribute apps to any platform.
The company calls its strategy "Games Everywhere," a possible nod to Sun Microsystems' messaging with the original Java programming language, which promised to help developers "write once and run anywhere." In this case, "everywhere" amounts to iOS, Android, HTML5, and Facebook. Windows Phone isn't mentioned among the list of supported platforms at Game Closure's website.
Color me thrilled by the prospects, even if it is a thumb in the eye of Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL). The late Steve Jobs actively discouraged developers from trying to build cross-platform iOS apps. Instead, he wanted coders writing directly to the iPhone programming interface.
Game Closure sees that as wasted work, and has come up with a solution to fix the problem. Bravo.
And Zynga? I'm not optimistic. The company, already bereft of original game ideas, badly needs as much programming talent as it can get its hands on. Desegur's departure only widens the gap.
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