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AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

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Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#101

Post by JustExAWS »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #23
alberth wrote: post #4

At one time, AOL had a market cap of $200B https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-intern...

I always look at the AOLTimeWarner merger as the thing that broke them, distracting them at the moment they should've been prepping to roll out broadband. I also look at that merger through the lens of "don't fight a land war in Asia" in terms of breaking empires -- "don't let your company acquire Warner Bros.".

AOL did exactly the right thing. They knew their stock was overvalued and did some shady accounting to prop their stock up until the acquisition and it immediately crashed.

How could they “get into broadband”? They weren’t going to be able to create the last mile infrastructure. We see how that worked out for Google.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#103

Post by xp84 »

palmotea wrote: post #44
underlipton wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 still kick myself for spending 6x MVNO pricing on my cell phone plan with a legacy carrier whose features I didn't need. I have a friend who tried to switch to a MVNO (Cricket, I think) to save money and immediately switched back. Even though both companies were on the same network, the MVNO customers must have had a lower priority, because their service level was noticeably worse when literally the only thing th…

There's a good reddit, i think NoContract, where you can go to learn more about MVNOs. There are several tiers of them in practice and they each have their own "catches" and "advantages". I used Cricket many years ago when they had a punishing speed cap. In the modern days some of these caps have been relaxed, but as you suspected, prioritization is the main way the actual carriers differentiate themselves from the MVNOs that sell access to the same towers. The worst MVNOs have terrible priority and in any well-populated area congestion makes them super slow almost all the time.

The thing is, this is highly variable -- and also geographically variable -- and some MVNOs can now offer similar priority as a mainstream plan. US Mobile is one, which I've been using for a couple years. Their neat advantage is that they will sell you a SIM (or e-sim) that rides on your choice of the big 3, and they'll also let you port between them without any other change to your account. They call this "Tele-Port". Some people will do that even just to go on a vacation to a state with different "best carrier", since there's nothing stopping you.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#104

Post by sauercrowd »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #43
jacobgkau wrote: post #32

People 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.

I think the reality is most of these are already dead, and a PE firm taking over is giving them one more chance

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#105

Post by timmg »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #75
jrochkind1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, that's interesting.

I was a very early Evernote (paid) user. But they lost their way sometime after they became a unicorn, so I bailed out.

I had assumed, since they were bought, that it was just a way to squeeze money from existing users. I had no idea they were actually improving things.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#106

Post by echelon »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #75
jrochkind1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you ever tried Obsidian? I feel like it's capable of replacing the entire family of note and knowledge management apps.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#107

Post by ryandrake »

jandrese wrote: post #79
nostrademons wrote: post #64

Far 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.

There are plenty of other companies setting much more money on fire these days. The money furnace business model is as healthy as ever.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#108

Post by [deleted] »

jjice wrote: post #13

I don't know much about Bending Spoons, but I associate them with Evernote now. Not sure if Evernote's downfall is associated with them or predates them. I never used Evernote, that's just what I hear. From what I've seen over the years, people don't like the way the product has moved and they really don't like the frequent price increases for not product change.

[deleted]

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#109

Post by philipallstar »

xp84 wrote: post #98
pavel_lishin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In November 2022, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Evernote.[19] The acquisition was concluded in January 2023.[20] In July 2023, Evernote laid off all of its existing staff and announced it would relocate to Europe to be closer to Bending Spoons' headquarters.[21] Damn.

This is exactly how European companies do when they acquire American ones, especially "Tech" companies that have well-paid technical staff. You can hire in Eastern Europe for far less, and can hire in Western Europe for still a significant bargain compared to what engineers and associated people make in California - plus, dealing with an 8+ hour time difference is brutal compared to keeping it all in Europe. A friend…

Almost anywhere in America is also cheaper than California.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#110

Post by chrononaut »

logifail wrote: post #88
skrebbel wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow way to miss the point

My domain registration is just over 25 years old... I guess I'm also "legacy"? I don't think I'm missing any point, thanks.

A lot of these old services used the email address as the fixed user identifier making it much less likely (certainly for those bucket of services) that he'd have a user-facing option of changing it.
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