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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

#91

Post by LogicHound »

underlipton wrote: post #19
Jordan-117 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to ads on their web properties, they still have a sizeable (though aging) userbase that they milk for unnecessary services. I cancelled my mom's AOL subscription years ago and they were charging something like $25/mo when the only thing she used was their (free) email service -- though of course during the cancellation they touted things like antivirus and ID theft protection that she apparently had acces…

"Unexamined legacy subscriptions paid without a thought," is another way of saying, "Has too much money." If this is a widespread Boomer phenomenon, it explains a lot. I still kick myself for spending 6x MVNO pricing on my cell phone plan with a legacy carrier whose features I didn't need.

It is easy to miss a subscription for something on a bill when it is less than £30. I had a match.com subscription I had forgotten about for about 7 years.

That business model is what a lot of tech companies actually bank on that why they require a credit card on a free sign up.

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

#92

Post by veidr »

mikeyouse wrote: post #54
veidr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to imply Bending Spoons is this awesome, as I know nothing much about them (except that they named their company after a weird scam, lol), but there's a pretty reasonable principle that might apply here: If our service goes down for any reason, uh... wait until Monday afternoon, then try again. (Sorry!) Like, who would die if AOL was down for 36 hours?

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

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

#93

Post by dotcoma »

mattmaroon wrote: post #76
ottah wrote: post #68

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.

Then 1.5 B is a steal!

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

#94

Post by Macha »

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.

AOL mail and Verizon mail had both been migrated to the yahoo mail backend when I left the company. This one kind of feels like a weird acquisition to me as that’s the story for a lot of AOL properties these days - a differently branded front end to the same services as their Yahoo counterpart. It would surely be much more costly to run AOL outside Yahoo as now you need to spread the costs of maintaining all that across fewer users

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

#95

Post by dotcoma »

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.

Yahoo! Mail is still working

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

#96

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

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…

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

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

#98

Post by xp84 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #17
neom wrote: post #2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons Interesting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476

> In November 2022, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Evernote.[19] The acquisition was concluded in January 2023.[20] In July 2023, Evernote laid off all of its existing staff and announced it would relocate to Europe to be closer to Bending Spoons' headquarters.[21] Damn.

This is exactly how European companies do when they acquire American ones, especially "Tech" companies that have well-paid technical staff. You can hire in Eastern Europe for far less, and can hire in Western Europe for still a significant bargain compared to what engineers and associated people make in California - plus, dealing with an 8+ hour time difference is brutal compared to keeping it all in Europe.

A friend I know is going through such an acquisition, funny thing is it's a European company acquiring his, but owned by an American PE firm. The American PE firm knows that cutting-edge tech is developed by expensive engineers on the West Coast, but when it's time to milk a more mature company for cash flow, you want cheaper European staff.

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

#99

Post by Barrin92 »

everfrustrated wrote: post #38
dancc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder if that's got lost in translation somewhere. I can understand not having on-call operations teams (an anti-pattern) but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely. Unless they mean to say its part of all devs job expectations and not a paid extra.

>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.

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

#100

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

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.

> 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.

Yeah. I have some biz clients with long-held verizon.net email accounts. Ever since 2017, verizon.net has felt like some barely-there netherverse, where the laws of physics keep upending themselves for funsies.

In this analogy, the laws of physics are pop/imap/smtp settings (and auth req), which aren't at all well-tethered. I suspect the engineers have the server settings printed on D&D dice; I think they reroll their mail servers whenever the game isn't exciting enough.

So what happens to those biz email accounts now - now that the entire AOL snowglobe has been picked up by a different corporate toddler? I have no way to tell.

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