As a former Eazel employee, I can say that indeed Eazel did not get acquired by Apple.
As the Wikipedia page states, a sizable pool of people went to work on Safari 1.0 (and some are still working on Safari). Others went to Apple to work on the Finder or Core Graphics.
Another big chunk of people went to Danger to work on the T-Mobile Sidekick.
But the company shut down. No one was left besides the CFO.
Yeah I completely agree. In the era where people could build a career in this area, they developed skills and brought insight that made the whole product better. Automated testing and SRE/DevOps reliability that I see focused on today do not fill in the gaps.
This is totally a thing. In the late 90s when I worked at Microsoft and then at startups, QA was made up of full time employees whose leadership had input into the product process.
Today at my large tech company, QA is mostly contract employees validating test plans that the normal engineers author. Zero autonomy or ownership offered.
They seem to be a common part of the Airforce One entourage. When the President is in the SF Bay Area, I see these commonly fly over residential areas. Given their history and the apparent unexplained failure, this has always struck me as unwise.
Have to say, I bought a DJI drone that I enjoyed, but then the app stopped working after my Android phone upgraded to a new OS version. Even months later, it appeared that DJI had made no effort to fix this issue (which clearly did not affect only me). There are open source apps, but the existing open source apps at the time did not control a specific unique and important feature on the drone I bought.
As the Wikipedia page states, a sizable pool of people went to work on Safari 1.0 (and some are still working on Safari). Others went to Apple to work on the Finder or Core Graphics.
Another big chunk of people went to Danger to work on the T-Mobile Sidekick.
But the company shut down. No one was left besides the CFO.