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LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

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Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#281
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the business model for a piece of software is ads I will not be using that software.

It's ads for their own products, not third party ads. (It's a little sidebar you can close). Anyway, no one is forcing you to use it, but it seems a reasonable free choice for now (teamviewer and splashtop, for example, don't allow free commercial use...and commercial means connecting to your own work laptop, not just using it directly for money making activities like paid support.)

"It's ads for their own products, not third party ads. (It's a little sidebar you can close)."

Are these ads delivered over the internet, or served locally?

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Teamviewer has a small business pricing model. I love their product. However, I only have ~ 70 clients I need to support at a 501c3 school. Their cost are still too high for us.

https://www.techsoup.org/teamviewer $10 to TechSoup gets you 60% off list price for TeamViewer. Your license pays for simultaneous controlling sessions, so our plan that would have cost $200/mo. is $80. We've had access to TechSoup forever, but we keep forgetting to take advantage of it. We were able to make our money go a lot farther than it would have this year because we started looking through their catalog again…

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Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#284
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…

Those were the days. Windows XP really was the sweet spot when it came to reliability and hackability. Sure, Windows 7 was more stable, but also much more opaque. Although I never cloned machines, I did automate the hell out of installs. When it finally worked, it felt like a miracle. Boot from PXE and enjoy the show. I was happy to discover that the most important tool I used back then can still be found on the internet: http://unattended.sourceforge.net.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#285
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…

"To decrypt that data the attacker will need both your Master Password and your Secret Key. A Secret Key is a 128-bit key generated locally on your device, your Master Password is a passphrase set by you. These two keys are combined and, to simplify greatly, used to decrypt your data." I'm curious how syncing works, specifically in regards to the Secret Key. Seemingly, to me, if the process works as described; I'd ne…

Have a look at ‘Enrolling a new client’ in the white paper linked in the parent comment. The secret key is transmitted to the new device.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#287
post #223
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you have numbers showing the total number of whiners like me are an acceptable loss, but I find dropping that feature inexplicable, honestly.

To be clear, we haven't dropped anything. We still sell licenses. We still provide local vaults, in fact you can use them via a license (that we still sell) AND you can use them with a subscription. Want to buy a license? On the Mac app for instance, open it on a fresh installation. Goto the welcome screen that pops up on first launch, from the list of options choose the "Create a new Local Vault" option in the list.…

I know you haven't dropped anything yet.

The Windows release and the choices your firm made about how to talk about the change have made it pretty clear where this is headed.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#288
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for this. The only reason I ever got onto 1Password in the first place was because I didn't have to use any cloud storage, and could use wifi sync between my devices. I was extremely disappointed as that started to change. It was an absolute nightmare having to retrain all family members in the nuanced differences in how Bitwarden works compared to 1Password. I hope I don't end up having to eat that cost a second…

It seems really self-centered to retrain non-technical family on new software to satisfy your own philosophical needs that they may not share. There is nothing about “being a cloud service” that makes 1Password unusable for your family other than your own objections. On the contrary, it probably protects your family against their own incompetence compared to messing with local files, or depending on you to run a serv…

Presumably they 1) haven't enslaved their family and 2) aren't charging them for tech support

If 1) is true then the family doesn't have to do what they say. They choose to do what they say because they value their technical expertise. Part of which is a preference for non-cloud solutions. That they don't share it seems irrelevant if they've already decided oarsinsync knows better. If they're like the average person then they probably don't value any password manager much at all beyond oarsinsync saying to use one.

If 2) is true then it's generally accepted for the free help giver to make decisions that make their life easier that they might otherwise not for a paid client. Your chef dad doesn't go to the same effort to plate food at home as they do at work. Your mechanic brother might pop a beer and ask you to hold the light while they fix something wrong with your motor. And yeah, the family computer nerd will put the free help receivers on to the same software they use so they're familiar with any problems that might occur. If oursinsync moves over to bitwarden themselves but leaves their family on 1Password and something goes wrong with 1Password in the future, what is the non self-centered move? Are they stuck relearning whatever changes 1Password has made since then? Should they refer their family to customer service?

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#289
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…

I always assume that something free might go away or become unfree at any moment. Doesn’t seem too surprising to me.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, ConnectWise is also owned by private equity (Thoma Bravo). TB seems to be supporting the growth of the company.

My current employer was formerly owned by Thoma Bravo. They "supported growth" on the surface. Under that veneer was really juicing up the company to make us more attractive for their exit - short term decisions that have resulted in a lot of employee burnout and have put us in a bad place under our new ownership. I hope to not have to work for a PE-owned company in the future, as their goals (to position for their e…

So the quarterly goals of public companies are better? Many companies sell to sponsors in order to be able to make long term strategic decisions.
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