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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

#181

Post by muglug »

BryantD wrote: post #136
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…

Vimeo is the really interesting case for me, because they are the white label hosting providers for a large number of niche streaming services -- Criterion Channel comes to mind, for example. Evernote failing is sad but lower on indirect effects. Vimeo going down would leave a noticeable hole in the streaming world.

Vimeo won’t “go down” anytime soon. It might get worse/more expensive, but it’s not in imminent danger. And it’s also not the only white-label provider around, either.

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

#182

Post by no_wizard »

al_borland wrote: post #138
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.

Yahoo tried that business model and it didn’t go too well for them. Maybe we’ll see Bending Spoons but Tumblr and Flickr next.

Tumblr was bought by Yahoo then sold for comparative peanuts to Automattic, of Wordpress fame

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

#183

Post by no_wizard »

jacobgkau wrote: post #145
vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bending Spoons are the GOAT enshittifiers. Meetup has become a mess where you constantly get popups for their premium accounts and the price changes almost every week. The site is also quite buggy

Bending Spoons bought Meetup in Janaury 2024. I recall Meetup's pricing getting crappified before that, and their website's always been a mess. So imo, we can't point to Bending Spoons as the cause of that, necessarily. (This is a similar story to Vimeo; they've been forcing a pricing scheme update gradually over the past year, and now Bending Spoons is buying them. I'm sure some people will get the timeline mixed up…

I’m honestly surprised that Vimeo never jived their niche. They could have been a great alternative to YouTube, in that they could have been the ownership platform for content creators. They just never seemed particularly focused long enough to make it happen

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

#184

Post by com2kid »

dylan604 wrote: post #52
everfrustrated wrote: post #39

Earlier 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?

Got my HM chair during the first wave of COVID lockdowns!

I'm guessing excess GPUs maybe? Everyone gets their own AI home lab!

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

#185

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

zipy124 wrote: post #134
bayindirh wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evernote isn't being "maintained". It's being actively developed with new, useful features and being transformed to a much bigger and powerful tool month by month. 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 t…

In this sense I mean maintain as a business not necessarily as software. E.g pivoting from growth to efficiency in the business sense. If you increase your price as substantially as they did, you must improve the software to keep users from just up and quitting. It's not clear they have been successful in this yet, losing market share to other competitors. That is they aren't actively trying to compete and take in ne…

> find the minimum amount of money and people needed to maintain it

> you must improve the software to keep users from just up and quitting

You’re shifting the goalposts. Either they’re doing the bare minimum to maintain it, or they’re improving it with new features. And that too improving it with enough new features to justify a higher price.

And honestly, neither of these are bad things because none of their products have strong lock ins. Either they’re maintaining a service that was otherwise failing and therefore keeping existing users satisfied, or they’re growing and improving it.

Software is hard, so whether they’re successful or not remains to be seen. And turnaround stories almost never happen in software so they’re taking on an even harder job, but so far there’s little evidence that they’re been user hostile.

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

#186

Post by mkhalil »

1.5 billion used to be an absolute ridiculous number to pay for a company not long ago. AOL? 1990s AOL?

But with 5 trillion dollar companies these days that are "worth" more than the entire GDP of Germany, why not. It's not real. It's just a number on a computer at this point.

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

#187

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

no_wizard wrote: post #183
jacobgkau wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bending Spoons bought Meetup in Janaury 2024. I recall Meetup's pricing getting crappified before that, and their website's always been a mess. So imo, we can't point to Bending Spoons as the cause of that, necessarily. (This is a similar story to Vimeo; they've been forcing a pricing scheme update gradually over the past year, and now Bending Spoons is buying them. I'm sure some people will get the timeline mixed up…

I’m honestly surprised that Vimeo never jived their niche. They could have been a great alternative to YouTube, in that they could have been the ownership platform for content creators. They just never seemed particularly focused long enough to make it happen

Vimeo never seemed to figure out what they wanted to be.

Did they want to be a white label video hosting provider? Did they want to be a social media network? Did they want to be prestige TV for the online age? Did they want to be IFC (indie movies) for the internet?

If they had picked one track and stuck to it they would have done a lot better but they ended up at the intersection of all those disparate spaces which ended up being a very tiny place.

They had several opportunities to become a legitimate competitor to YouTube with the number of times YT dropped the ball over the past decade but they never made the big move they probably should have.

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

#190

Post by madog »

criddell wrote: post #172
timmg wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like Evernote but it just isn’t worth $130 / year for me. Last year they had a sale for $50 (or was it $60) for a year and I paid for that. If I can’t renew at that I’ll have to figure out how to migrate to Obsidian.

Migrating to Obsidian looks to be very easy now: https://help.obsidian.md/import/evernote

When I converted many years ago it required 3rd party tools and was slightly more involved (but still totally worth it).

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