121–130 of 280 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they’re actually named after the scene in the matrix where the little kid (and then Neo) can bend the spoon with their mind.
Oh! LOL that's admittedly cooler than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Geller
Not sure how actively AOL is used, probably not really, but anything Bending Spoon touches is entshitified soon after. They most recently bought Komoot, and have already made questionable choices with a lot of firings and promoting paid plans. Same has happened to Meetup. It is a sad reality that this company keeps buying good products and making it hostile for users who made it good, such as in the Komoot's or Meetu…
Perhaps more than you think.
I was recently looking through an e-mail distribution list that my company uses and was surprised how many @aol.coms were on there. Easily hundreds.
People in the tech bubble vastly underestimate the number of @aol.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, @earthlink.net and other legacy e-mail addresses regular people still use. After all, it's their e-mail address. Why would they ever change it?
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.
I think the reality is most of these are already dead, and a PE firm taking over is giving them one more chance
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…
Meetup.. the promise of meetup was the organizers pay a fee so the members don’t have too. My partner organized one a decade ago. I’m still a member of a couple but now they’re really going after group members with ads and upsells. It still works but has become kind of icky. Bending spoons, the name just sends up red flags as parlor trickery.
They bought Komoot, laid off 80% of the staff, but they still did a major redesign of the app and website afterwards. I expected outages, but so far it works like before.
This sounds like "doing a major redesign" would be something positive. I'm a paying customer since ages and use the app on daily basis. The new design adds nothing except confusion, at the same time they broke the app on my smartwatch. I'm pretty much thinking about switching apps because I don't see myself buying a new watch just because of this.
Some companies would be better off with less bored designers. This is exactly the same situation like a couple of years ago, when Spotify every week rearranged the GUI and every week I had to relearn how I can reach the same functionality. Back then I had to use the App Store to give feedback, but I see now I can do the same directly in the Komoot app. They're gonna have something to laugh about...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems to be the opposite of what the article suggests, they seem to hold on long-term and invest in technology improvements.
seems to be less invest, and more buy mature products and find the minimum amount of money and people needed to maintain it, whilst squeezing existing customers (which generally doesn't lead to long-term stategy).
Features felt like stuck on it haphazardly are now completely integrated into the tool itself, and everything incl. performance is getting better.
I'm no longer actively using Evernote, but I have some shared notebooks there and still use it from time to time.
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.
I'd say it's only just slightly improved now, with a few bugs fixed and features improved. Not at all worth the price increase.
And it was horrible for a good 6 months after the acquisition... Some days I could not login to the website for several hours. Images in some notes wouldn't load some days. Searches would be missing results. Bug reports sat idle for a couple months before someone would respond asking for more info.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the reality is most of these are already dead, and a PE firm taking over is giving them one more chance
But BP is not a PE firm, they do have developers. Most (all?) of their acquisitions are still being updated albeit presumably on a skeleton crew.
In fact this is much like the older form of PE, where efficiency gains were the main objective.
Bigger PE firms now usually focus on roll-up strategies (buy loads of similar companies and merge, say car washes is big right now for example, as well as dental, vet and family doctor/GP practices) as well as utilising bucket loads of leverage to amplify gains. This does not however make what bending spoons is doing not PE.
Sure, but isn't the user base also incredibly aged, and literally dying off? They're also not very tech-savvy or likely to embrace new offerings.
If anything, it seems like the opportunity is to reclaim the old brand and try to make it a thing with Gen Alpha kids or something, via kitsch and some genuinely useful offerings (like more email storage than gmail, or something).
Why 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.
AOL owns neither of these