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LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

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Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#151
post #54

My old company used Logmein professionally to remotely manage 100s of computers for many years before switching to ConnectWise. They had a great product for a long time but some of the worse licensing decisions I've ever seen. It went from being completely free to several thousand dollars overnight without any additional features, support, etc being offered. And meanwhile development was stagnant with only weird chan…

An interesting approach. When I worked at a university and had 100+ machines to handle (back in the WinXP days), we just used udpcast + sysprep to do full disk cloning. We never bothered with individual machines, if anything ever went wrong we just wiped the whole thing and re-cloned it. Keeping 100+ machines up and running, and caring for individual ones sounds like a whole lot of work. Admittedly we got away with i…

My second job out of high school was at my school district as a PC Tech. I had the highest successful case closures of any technician because they all tried to fix the problem. I just moved the user's local docs to their network share, re-imaged the PC in 5-10 minutes, and copied their local docs back to their local folder. I had ~1000 desktops under my management between my 3 K-9 schools.

Worst job I have ever had though. The amount of politics that go on in a public school is ridiculous.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great product, hundreds of computers for professional purposes, and "several thousand dollars" is a sticking point? Why?

Windows itself costs $200 or so. LogMeIn isn't worth 5 times as much as the operating system. At that price, it very quickly becomes cheaper to investigate alternatives like just using a Linux machine where remote management is a breeze, and there are tons of high-quality, free tools (with optional paid support contracts that are very inexpensive by comparison.)

Although I agree with your statement of value, it should be noted that Windows does not cost companies $200. Microsoft has a much lower per seat number that most companies pay.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there weren't pieces of software that people were willing to pay a subscription for, then software quality would be horrible. The reason why 1Password is so good is that the developers are paid to work on it, and some business needs (such as having really good quality stuff so you can get recommended to more potential customers, and so that your existing customers don't leave) push you towards higher quality softw…

I don't remember software quality being a ton worse before software subscriptions became common. Operating systems and certain development practices (maybe, less certain about that one) have led to some noticeable improvements, but that mostly happened before the shift.

The major difference you may be overlooking is that now everything is connected and online, and as a result the software we use day-to-day needs much more active maintenance than before.

When you had a computer sitting in your home that connected to the Internet via modem for 2 hours a day, your OS or apps could be riddled with hidden bugs and holes and it didn't matter as much.

Now we are constantly operating in insecure-by-default environments, and (responsible) companies have to spend much more to monitor, improve and maintain their applications over time, as devices change, underlying operating systems change, new threats are detected and published, etc..

Hence subscriptions..

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#154
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: 1. Got it. Re: 2. It's not just subscription. Download the app (Mac or Windows) and in the options choose to create a new local vault. You'll be presented with a dialog to buy a license if you don't already have one. I get the complaints about subscriptions, but there are certainly pieces of software I am willing to pay a subscription for. One that is actively improved, secured, and is used throughout my day is o…

Hey Kyle! Been a long time paying user. 1Password has helped me help my family use better passwords. We all have local vaults, but I often recommend and help onboard companies I consult with to the hosted service. Thanks for building an awesome app!

How would you regain access to the passwords in the local vault if the phone breaks or gets stolen and prevent them from being lost?

I chose not to use a local vault because I fear those scenarios more than the cloud sync via 1Password being compromised.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#156
post #132

LogMeIn Hamachi was a pretty great way of setting up a LAN over the internet for gaming. We used to play Minecraft on it all the time in college.

Hamachi was created by Alex Pankratov. Once LogMeIn purchased Hamachi, they ruined it with the following update ( either purposefully or accidentally ) by making it no longer work with a large handful of older games. That sanfu in combination with a more bloated UI, forced LogMeIn account, and a splattering of useless features made it obsolete within a few months. It was the fastest rise and fall of a piece of softwa…

FWIW I didn't use it until 2011, which sounds like it was years after the acquisition. It's always sad to see a beloved product go downhill over time, but at that point it was still pretty great.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have recently taken quite a bit of VC money though. https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/14/fourteen-years-after-launc...

And they talked about why in more detail here: https://rework.fm/venture-capital-and-control-with-david-tea... Edit: Fixed typo. Would also like to add that their use of VC money appears less risky than one could assume.

Thanks for the link. I'll try to find the time to listen to it.

Regardless, I don't feel personally comfortable with having my passwords in custody of a VC funded enterprise. I am looking into start self-hosting something like Bitwarden in the near future.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#158
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may want to take a closer look at how 1Password works. I'll give a quick rundown here, but our security white paper goes into much greater detail: https://1pw.ca/whitepaper Your data is encrypted locally on your devices, it is never available in a decrypted form on any of our servers. A compromise of our servers would result in the attacker getting gibberish (encrypted data). To decrypt that data the atta…

Replying to this as I can't reply to the other child comment: The secret key is emailed given to you when you enroll and is used, frequently, every time you enroll a new device. 1Password would have to screw up catastrophically to just not use it. Obviously they _could_ screw up catastrophically, but if you don't trust them to operate their service with a basic level of competence you probably shouldn't be using them…

The comment above says Secret Key is generated on my device, how can it be emailed anywhere? I don't quite understand how one can enroll other devices with local Secret Key, so I assume Secret Key has to leave my device and travel over the wire. Which raises even more questions, but even if it's not the way it's generated makes a big difference.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#159

These guys must really be pessimistic about their future if they are accepting a deal of $86/share. Their 52 week high was $96/share, and as high as $120/share last year.

> Under the terms of the Agreement, LogMeIn shareholders will receive $86.05 in cash for each share of LogMeIn’s common stock they hold. This consideration represents a premium of approximately 25% to LogMeIn’s unaffected closing stock price on September 18, 2019, the last trading day before a media report was published speculating about a potential sale process. The Board of Directors of LogMeIn approved the Agreement and recommended that shareholders vote in favor of the transaction.

Looks like it was only $96/share because there was rumors of this sale.

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