https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons Interesting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476
oh wow and they got Vimeo and WeTransfer too!?
AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
71–80 of 280 posts
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if that's got lost in translation somewhere. I can understand not having on-call operations teams (an anti-pattern) but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely. Unless they mean to say its part of all devs job expectations and not a paid extra.
I don't want to imply Bending Spoons is this awesome, as I know nothing much about them (except that they named their company after a weird scam, lol), but there's a pretty reasonable principle that might apply here: If our service goes down for any reason, uh... wait until Monday afternoon, then try again. (Sorry!) Like, who would die if AOL was down for 36 hours?
Considering AOL's business model was to keep old folks paying for dialup, and once they moved off of dialup continue paying for access to the AOL portal, a good chunk of their user base may already be dead and still being billed.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition to ads on their web properties, they still have a sizeable (though aging) userbase that they milk for unnecessary services. I cancelled my mom's AOL subscription years ago and they were charging something like $25/mo when the only thing she used was their (free) email service -- though of course during the cancellation they touted things like antivirus and ID theft protection that she apparently had acces…
"Unexamined legacy subscriptions paid without a thought," is another way of saying, "Has too much money." If this is a widespread Boomer phenomenon, it explains a lot. I still kick myself for spending 6x MVNO pricing on my cell phone plan with a legacy carrier whose features I didn't need.
I hate to admit it, but it’s like me and my Digitalocean bills (:
I don’t want to think about how much money I’ve paid them over the years for VMs I no longer need. A week ago I finally pulled the plug on those servers. Not a moment too soon…
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#74I'm still using an email that is one of the AOL domains, mostly for accessing legacy sites that were around at that time. I lost access to it during an iPhone upgrade, I paid $12.95 or something for a 'premium' membership that allowed me to have the password reset by a REAL LIVE PERSON.
> I'm still using an email that is one of the AOL domains ProTip: Honestly, just buy your own domain, control your own email address(es)...
Wow way to miss the point
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#75People usually mention Evernote when Bending Spoons is brought up, but I also know them as purchasing Meetup (after it was already sort of struggling) and, more recently, entering an agreement to purchase Vimeo (of which I'm a paid user). AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Ya…
It sounds like Bending Spoons is where old tech products go to die? I guess that's private equity for you.
Understandably people don't like Bending Spoons - they fired the whole dev team on Evernote, and the price has gone way up too.. but as a user I have to say Evernote the product has gotten better and better since the acquisition. They've improved performance and have great new features every month.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#76Why would it even be worth that? Patents? Copyrights? Certainly not the trademark.
Revenue. They’ve still got millions of email/portal users and they own LifeLock, Lastpass, and a bunch of other crap. They are still rumored to do nearly a half billion a year in revenue and the margins are good.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#77Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does that possibly work? How do they continue with zero of the staff?
Simple. They get new staff whose job is to shove intrusive surveillance and advertising into the product and push out an update, they don't have to support or develop the product. The company bought the product to bilk money out of its existing users. They throw the product in the bin once all the users have gone. Sadly, some ants get infected with corydceps. Tragic for the ant, but the other ants get it the fuck awa…
As an Evernote user, Bending Spoons has been iterating fast over the past couple years to improve the product. It’s much better than it used to be.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#79Far cry from the AOL - Time Warner merger, where AOL purchased Time Warner for $183B, creating a company with a combined $350B market cap.
Yes, there is much less money to set on fire this time.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#80Can someone enlighten me on the economics of such a deal?
From what I know about acquisitions, valuations are in the range of 10-12 times annual EBITDA (or perhaps even profits). This would mean that AOL is making 150 million a year. Is that correct?