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LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

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Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#231

Post by jbarberu »

csmattryder wrote: post #88
gravitas wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a +1 on BitWarden, I moved over pretty early on (paid account is only $10/yr) due to their fantastic migration page telling me point blank "LastPass may screw up special characters exporting your data" and lo and behold, my initial export had a bunch of HTML entities injected just like they said. That disclosure/warning sold me right then and there: https://help.bitwarden.com/article/import-from-lastpass/

I have a few access keys in my LastPass account that contain quotation marks as part of the secret. Their web interface won't present the textarea field for me to copy the key for use. I'd have to resort to the export options to get the plaintext and Ctrl+F for the key. They're AWS keys, so LogMeIn's own staff should've had the same gripes I have, but it's just not fixed yet. I'm going to take a look at BitWarden and…

"I'm going to take a look at BitWarden and see if I can move over as a winter break task."

I did it in 20 minutes this morning, would highly recommend!

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#232

Post by Avamander »

aguyfromnb wrote: post #204
gravitas wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a +1 on BitWarden, I moved over pretty early on (paid account is only $10/yr) due to their fantastic migration page telling me point blank "LastPass may screw up special characters exporting your data" and lo and behold, my initial export had a bunch of HTML entities injected just like they said. That disclosure/warning sold me right then and there: https://help.bitwarden.com/article/import-from-lastpass/

> moved over pretty early on (paid account is only $10/yr) LastPass started as $1/month, which I thought was a great deal. I started using it in 2011, and never really paid attention to the fee. Then, it got bought by LogMeIn, and in 2017 they upped the price to $2/month. Last year they upped it to $3/month ($39..that's when I noticed the charge). That's right: for 6 years it was one price, which tripled in 2 years w…

If anything the price increase came with an enormously slower plugin. I switched because it just pissed me off.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#234

Post by bduerst »

steveklabnik wrote: post #145
x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #56

Off-topic, but can anyone tell me of an instance whereby a software entity was acquired by a VC firm and things turned out great?

Others have pointed out the difference between VC and PE, but I think there's a crucial thing missing from your question: turned out great for whom ?

SOP for PE's is to come in, cut costs, and improve the bottom line without affecting revenue or service.

Customers typically aren't affected but employees are.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#235

Post by Blackstone4 »

jmuguy wrote: 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…

It does sound like they could have handled the switch better but.....going from completely free to paid...maybe they had mispriced the product and you had benefited from years of their hardwork at no cost? If they ended generating more revenue than they lost then it should be a net win for them. There's the reputational risk to consider by making this price transistion.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#236

Post by thijsvandien »

notoverthere wrote: post #224
thijsvandien wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A customer of mine had LogMeIn Pro just to access a single pc from a couple of phones every now and then. One day it suddenly stopped working. As it turned out, in the three years they had been using it, the price had hiked from about 100 EUR to over 350 EUR. Having no idea who charged them that much and what for, they reversed the credit card transaction. Since then, they've moved on to RealVNC. It's 1/10th of the p…

I'd recommend that your customer checks out [Chrome Remote Desktop]( https://remotedesktop.google.com/ ). It's completely free, simple to set up, and seems to perform way better than VNC. Plus no need to open firewall ports or worry about encryption and security – that's all handled for you.

Just for the record, you don't need to worry about any of that with RealVNC either, and the protocol seems way more efficient than any other VNC I've used. Frankly, I think the product should be renamed to get rid of this bad association. It's way more similar to LogMeIn Pro than TightVNC, for example.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#237

Post by AznHisoka »

jacquesm wrote: post #203
AznHisoka wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LogMeIn is a public company. Almost 90% of anyone who bought shares between mid-2016 and early 2019 probably saw a negative return from this because $86/share is still below the price it was at during that time. If this was a private company/startup, of course you'd be laughing all the way to the bank. Not so if you were a public investor in LogMeIn. Far from it.

I was mostly thinking from the perspective of a founder, not from a public investor.

That might be true though the founder most likely profited most of their money awhile back after the IPO.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#238

Post by thijsvandien »

Youden wrote: post #221
thijsvandien wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A customer of mine had LogMeIn Pro just to access a single pc from a couple of phones every now and then. One day it suddenly stopped working. As it turned out, in the three years they had been using it, the price had hiked from about 100 EUR to over 350 EUR. Having no idea who charged them that much and what for, they reversed the credit card transaction. Since then, they've moved on to RealVNC. It's 1/10th of the p…

> Don't let the name discourage you; the product has very little to do with the old and inefficient VNC protocol anymore. But RealVNC's products are all built on that same VNC protocol...? At least I see many things referencing it and nothing indicating that they don't use it.

If it's still based on VNC, for sure it's much more efficient (and user-friendlier packaged) than any of the open source competition I've experienced over the years. So much that I think that still using the name VNC does them more harm than good.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#239

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

jacquesm wrote: post #121
x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #56

Off-topic, but can anyone tell me of an instance whereby a software entity was acquired by a VC firm and things turned out great?

As Skrebbel already mentioned VC firms rarely acquire companies outright, but it is typical that in such transactions VCs are on the selling side and PE parties are on the buying side. So let's take it as read that you meant PE, in that case, it depends is the usual answer. There are quite a few examples of PE funds buying companies and letting them run as autonomous as possible with positive results and there are ex…

But I'm not talking about "headlines". I'm talking about declines or stagnation that I've seen firsthand. Qlik and ExtJS/Sencha (an Idera victim) all fall in the pattern of being acquired and falling from grace.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#240

Post by StavrosK »

AGKyle wrote: post #216
StavrosK wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that makes sense, though I might have kept the self-hosting feature hidden behind a wall of "you're REALLY not going to get ANY support for this" text. Then again, the maintenance might not even be worth it.

We still sell licenses, it's not super easy to find but it's there. Open the app on a new machine, on the welcome screen of options there's a "Create A New Local Vault" option, which takes you down the path of purchasing a license if one doesn't already exist. Those on subscriptions can also still create local vaults as well. You'd have a subscription plus the option of local vaults. So options haven't disappeared, t…

Hmm yeah, that's fair.
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