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LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

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Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#241

Post by AareyBaba »

AGKyle wrote: post #78
_def wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately 1password is the only one that doesn't give me headaches while using it cross-platform. I wish I could use an open alternative with an equal UX.

Heads up: I work for 1Password Any reason why you'd say unfortunately there? I see it as a pretty big perk rather than an unfortunately. But I would also like to understand a bit more so I can pass along any necessary feedback to our team. Thanks! Kyle 1Password Security Team

You introduced a feature without warning a while ago where 1Password would phone home for icons every time it is run (where previously users had the option of creating their own). When Little Snitch flagged this, I was very concerned that 1Password which I had entrusted with my secrets was phoning home without my consent. It took me a while to assure myself that 1Password was not uploading my data to the cloud. I don't see why a password manager needs to phone headquarters every time it is run. I have since blocked 1Password from phoning home using Little Snitch as a workaround.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#242

Post by jacquesm »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #239
jacquesm wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Skrebbel already mentioned VC firms rarely acquire companies outright, but it is typical that in such transactions VCs are on the selling side and PE parties are on the buying side. So let's take it as read that you meant PE, in that case, it depends is the usual answer. There are quite a few examples of PE funds buying companies and letting them run as autonomous as possible with positive results and there are ex…

But I'm not talking about "headlines". I'm talking about declines or stagnation that I've seen firsthand. Qlik and ExtJS/Sencha (an Idera victim) all fall in the pattern of being acquired and falling from grace.

I realize, but those are the ones that you will hear about. The bulk of PE investments works out just fine, but quietly. You will find out about them in annual reports and such but because those companies are almost by definition now in private hands there are no reporting requirements in the same way that there are for listed companies or for venture backed companies that are trying their best to pump up their valuation.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#243

Post by jacquesm »

bduerst wrote: post #234
steveklabnik wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others have pointed out the difference between VC and PE, but I think there's a crucial thing missing from your question: turned out great for whom ?

SOP for PE's is to come in, cut costs, and improve the bottom line without affecting revenue or service. Customers typically aren't affected but employees are.

That's one 'kind' of PE, another is the one that will invest very large sums of money to repeat a play in new markets or to professionalize a company across the board and then use them as a cornerstone in a buy-and-build strategy.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#244

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

rciorba wrote: post #130
jmuguy wrote: post #54

My old company used Logmein professionally to remotely manage 100s of computers for many years before switching to ConnectWise. They had a great product for a long time but some of the worse licensing decisions I've ever seen. It went from being completely free to several thousand dollars overnight without any additional features, support, etc being offered. And meanwhile development was stagnant with only weird chan…

An interesting approach. When I worked at a university and had 100+ machines to handle (back in the WinXP days), we just used udpcast + sysprep to do full disk cloning. We never bothered with individual machines, if anything ever went wrong we just wiped the whole thing and re-cloned it. Keeping 100+ machines up and running, and caring for individual ones sounds like a whole lot of work. Admittedly we got away with i…

In my own experience sysprep is not necessary anymore. In fact, we abandoned it because it seemed never to quite work properly anymore which leads me to believe that MS forgot it existed and broke it in some Win 10 update (Thanks guys! [I hate you]).

On modern networks and storage hardware, reimaging a PC from scratch is sometimes faster than rebooting Windows after an update (and always faster than a "feature" update).

Anyone looking into mass image deployment should check out Fog[0], because it is free and works pretty well.

[0] https://fogproject.org

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#245

Post by jacquesm »

AznHisoka wrote: post #237
jacquesm wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was mostly thinking from the perspective of a founder, not from a public investor.

That might be true though the founder most likely profited most of their money awhile back after the IPO.

The LastPass founder made his stash during the acquisition, it was for $100M or so in cash. But what about the LogMeIn founders the IPO was a decade ago but did they still have a position in the stock, and were they still with the company?

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#246

Post by ketralnis »

_jal wrote: post #94
AGKyle wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heads up: I work for 1Password Any reason why you'd say unfortunately there? I see it as a pretty big perk rather than an unfortunately. But I would also like to understand a bit more so I can pass along any necessary feedback to our team. Thanks! Kyle 1Password Security Team

Not the OP, but I dropped 1Password when it became clear you're forcing folks to cloud storage. I was sort of hoping the carefully chosen weasel-words about that used at the time meant you'd reconsider if enough of us made noise, but later releases made it clear where you're headed. It bummed me out - I really like 1pw. And I still don't have my password situation back to the same level of ease-of-use yet, but I swit…

Same. I'm holding out with a regular licence until they force me off but it's clear that they will, and that they'll probably use the mobile apps as the vehicle.

I've paid for every upgrade for myself and my family so I'm aggregately paying _more_ than I would have paid for the cloud service. But I don't want a cloud service

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#247

Post by Youden »

thijsvandien wrote: post #238
Youden wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't let the name discourage you; the product has very little to do with the old and inefficient VNC protocol anymore. But RealVNC's products are all built on that same VNC protocol...? At least I see many things referencing it and nothing indicating that they don't use it.

If it's still based on VNC, for sure it's much more efficient (and user-friendlier packaged) than any of the open source competition I've experienced over the years. So much that I think that still using the name VNC does them more harm than good.

I think perhaps you're unfamiliar with the open source competition. Most of the open source VNC servers support something like H.264 which while a little dated, is still quite efficient, especially for the low-latency streaming needed for remote desktop applications.

The only novel-looking thing I see on RealVNC's website is adaptive bitrate, which I don't think I've seen in the open source servers.

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#248

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #245
AznHisoka wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be true though the founder most likely profited most of their money awhile back after the IPO.

The LastPass founder made his stash during the acquisition, it was for $100M or so in cash. But what about the LogMeIn founders the IPO was a decade ago but did they still have a position in the stock, and were they still with the company?

[deleted]

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#249

Post by AGKyle »

AareyBaba wrote: post #241
AGKyle wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heads up: I work for 1Password Any reason why you'd say unfortunately there? I see it as a pretty big perk rather than an unfortunately. But I would also like to understand a bit more so I can pass along any necessary feedback to our team. Thanks! Kyle 1Password Security Team

You introduced a feature without warning a while ago where 1Password would phone home for icons every time it is run (where previously users had the option of creating their own). When Little Snitch flagged this, I was very concerned that 1Password which I had entrusted with my secrets was phoning home without my consent. It took me a while to assure myself that 1Password was not uploading my data to the cloud. I don…

You're certainly welcome to prevent that. We document every domain 1Password contacts here:

https://support.1password.com/ports-domains/

You can map things up pretty good here. However, note that Little Snitch may not provide the most accurate domains when it comes to CDN services. So do keep that in mind that it may reverse DNS incorrectly. I believe they document this on their own site as well. There's at least this that I could find:

https://forums.obdev.at/viewtopic.php?t=8859

We went so far as with the Mac application to provide a plist that documents each domain it contacts to give context within Little Snitch, but I suspect you're using 1Password X, which cannot provide the same feature.

There's also an open issue to be able to disable rich icons as a setting there. I was a little unhappy that we didn't provide an option for that feature in 1Password X, and I'll bring up again with that team that they need to provide the checkbox sooner rather than later.

Sorry you got bit by this though and thank you for the feedback!

Kyle

1Password Security Team

Re: LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity

#250

Post by phjesusthatguy3 »

0000011111 wrote: post #194
raintrees wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I have around 500 computers under management, finally left them for Teamviewer after LMI's price tripled and their features halved (or worse). I ran it mostly from Linux, which they seemed to be withdrawing support for.

I wish Teamviewer has a small business pricing model. I love their product. However, I only have ~ 70 clients I need to support at a 501c3 school. Their cost are still too high for us.

https://www.techsoup.org/teamviewer

$10 to TechSoup gets you 60% off list price for TeamViewer. Your license pays for simultaneous controlling sessions, so our plan that would have cost $200/mo. is $80.

We've had access to TechSoup forever, but we keep forgetting to take advantage of it. We were able to make our money go a lot farther than it would have this year because we started looking through their catalog again.

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