Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 280 posts

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

#161

Post by andrewf »

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.

My guess is that's indicative of the price Bending Spoons paid - they get a positive return on investment if they collect existing subscription revenue, and do a bit of work which keeps the existing userbase happy.

Under the previous ownership, the gap between Evernote's valuation (ie what investors had put in) and revenue (what investors would getting back) was so great that just surviving wasn't a strategy; the business could only value the existing userbase and product as a starting point for building a much larger userbase. That's a path to enshittification.

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

#163

Post by sgerenser »

JustExAWS wrote: post #101
ascagnel_ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Time Warner Cable (now Spectrum) was literally one of the pioneers of cable broadband. It seems like the best way for AOL to “get into broadband” at the time might have been buying Time Warner.

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

#164

Post by rhetocj23 »

zipy124 wrote: post #128
riffraff wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are definitely a PE firm. They buy up struggling companies with the aim to revitalise them, or otherwise recoup the cost of investment+ profit. They have switched to mainly relying on traditional debt rather than outside investor money recently but that doesn't make them not PE. 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 ro…

"They buy up struggling companies with the aim to revitalise them, or otherwise recoup the cost of investment+ profit."

1) Nope, they are focused on taking advantage of customer lock-in to raise prices, while reducing operating expenses to increase cash flows. There may be some initial reinvestment to increase surplus of its users, before raising prices substantially. 2) "recoup the cost of investment+ profit"? Yeah lets see if that pans out. The acquisition price is assumed to be under a going-concern basis in perpetuity, if they muck things up with the choices they make the acquisitions have a limited life to increase and capture those cash flows to deliver a positive NPV investment. The demand for the firms products are not perfectly inelastic w.r.t to price.

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

#165

Post by bigbuppo »

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.

They're the CA/Broadcom of as-a-service.

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

#167

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

RobotToaster wrote: post #67
dangus wrote: post #50

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.

Have you tried to use meetup recently? It's been turned into garbage.

I found it to be garbage, seven years ago. I stopped using them, when my meetups kept getting stuffed with fake accounts, and Meetup would then pressure me to upgrade to the next tier.

I could never prove that the fake accounts were them, but the optics weren’t good.

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

#168

Post by doodlebugging »

mattmaroon wrote: post #84
rootbear wrote: post #27

Verizon handed their email service over to AOL some years ago. I wonder if this will be the end for my unused @verizon.com account.

Somehow, my very first email, Hotmail (which was the only option when I got it really) is the only one from the 90s that is still kicking.

Earthlink remains great.

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

#169

Post by JSR_FDED »

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.

Evernote sucked by that time. Their user-driven support forums were so obviously a ploy to string along users while nothing changed. As a dev it was glaringly obvious to me they were milking not investing. Moving to Apple Notes was the simplest and best decision.
Post reply on HN