Is boomer goodwill that valuable?
AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
151–160 of 280 posts
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
We'll probably be saying the same about a lot of AI companies as well....
at the end of the last tech bubble, Herman Miller chairs were available for cheap. wonder what the score from the ashes will come this round?
I'd be super down for GPUs to be cheaper again.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Meetup now is weird.. they hide everything behind blurs (for example people's last names), but the blurs are CSS, and one could modify the CSS and get the obscured info. I think it also advertises "get premium to see gender ratios"...
> I think it also advertises "get premium to see gender ratios"...
Eww.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#154https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons Interesting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476
Someone wrote about Bending Spoons' history and playbook: https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma... I enjoyed this part: No On-Call Rotations: Bending Spoons aims to build systems so reliable that they eliminate the need for on-call rotations. This is unusual in the tech industry, where on-call duties are standard to promptly address system issues. For most of their products, they have no on-cal…
Seems reasonable if they're putting most of their acquisitions into maintenance mode. In my experience the vast majority of outages are caused by bad deploys of new code or configuration.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely. Bending Spoons is Milan based and most of Europe has very strong right-to-disconnect laws. It's not really uncommon here to not have anyone on call unless you're some big multinational.
All companies I've worked at had (paid) on-call set up. The right to disconnect isn't incompatible with business needs and the law contemplates it. Also, nurses and doctors do it too.
Yeah that law is really about not taking advantage of low paid-by-the-hour employees vs high paid salaried.
But give people any excuse and they'll run with it.
In the UK custom has always been to require a standard opt-out to be signed as part of hiring process.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#156what does AOL even do these days? genuinely curious.
They got own branded Chromium with extra features: https://youtu.be/z_NpZmk61Qo
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#157> That "incredibly loyal user base," as he called it, could be better served with greater investments in AOL's product and user experience, he noted. 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 som…
Some of us would have been willing to pay --- still annoyed all my members.aol.com pages were first defaced by ads (I would've paid extra to not have such) and then went away (I'd've been willing to pay a reasonable fee to keep them online).
This does however explain why a bunch of accounts I forgot to log into for a couple of years are gone.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#158I'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 think my mom spends several hours a week talking to a live person at Compuserve because she lost her password or various other reasons. They don't seem to be under any time pressure and are happy to chat with her as long as she wants.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#159Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#160Earlier 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.
Yes they have finally fixed some performance issues and that
is a huge win