The future of Synergy

We’ve made an important decision and are making significant changes to the Synergy team at Symless.

A little background first: for those who don't know, the last 6 months have been dramatic. We've been a team of 10 people working tirelessly on Synergy 2 trying to make it a great product that Just Works™. Actually, you may have read that things didn’t go so well since Synergy 2 is back to beta and Synergy 1 is now the recommended version. In light of this, over the next 12 months, we’re planning on making enormous changes in the company. After some very careful thought, as CEO I have decided that what the Synergy team needs is a significantly higher ratio of hands-on Software Engineers as well as more streamlined financials.

Here’s the important bit: I’ve made the difficult decision to let go of all staff whose role is not purely hands-on Software Engineering. The re-staffing decision is partially from a short-term financial streamlining perspective, but also because my dream as CEO is to have a team 90% comprised of Software Engineers. For the short term, I will be taking over all product development, website development, marketing, HR, management, customer support, and business activities. In around 6 months, I plan to start rehiring more Software Engineers. If you’re obsessed with using multiple computers and have a flare for C++, you should check out the Symless careers page.

Many have asked: what is the long-term plan with Synergy 1 and Synergy 2? I can confirm that we will be continuing to improve Synergy 1 by fixing critical bugs over the coming months. However, we do plan to focus our major change efforts on Synergy 2 Beta. The focus for Synergy 2 in the future will be to make it less reliant on the new cloud config system by introducing UDP broadcast as the primary network discovery method (which will then fall back to cloud config discovery if unsuccessful). For those users who have UDP broadcast disabled on their network (pretty common on many corporate networks) and also don’t want to use (or can’t use) the cloud config, we’ll be adding a manual configuration mode. Of course, we’ll also be adding a settings screen to Synergy 2, exposing all those wonderful features that Synergy 1 has (hotkeys, key swapping, dead corners, etc.).

We’re really excited about the future, and we’re looking forward to building a team of talented Software Engineers to make Synergy 2 the best that it can be.