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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
holden_nelson wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
Highly recommended the Bending Spoons episode of The Pragmatic Engineer
podcast. They address the layoffs head-on and talk about some of their
other unconventional stuff like no on-call.
URI [1]: https://pca.st/episode/11464df6-e1cc-4b8f-a64d-a4de9a9ec170
mkhalil wrote 4 hours 7 min ago:
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.
leoc wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
A good effort, but not at the level of âTwitter Acquires Magic
Ponyâ or the unmatchable âSalesforce Acquires Slackâ.
jmspring wrote 4 hours 49 min ago:
In all honesty, Bending Spoons acquiring AOL will probably have
better synergy across their portfolio than Salesforce buying Slack.
Having worked at SF, even working in dev rel/infra ops, it was mostly
"slack who?". That acquisition was more like the Skype/Lync - aka,
not really integrated, but tried - as opposed to MS buying GitHub and
mostly keeping it independent.
poemxo wrote 5 hours 37 min ago:
Part of me wonders how much of that 1.5B is the value of all those chat
logs.
rchaud wrote 3 hours 27 min ago:
Chat logs from AOL Instant Messenger, which shut down in 2017, and
was obsolete for almost a decade prior to that?
jlarocco wrote 6 hours 14 min ago:
I had never heard of Bending Spoons before.
Their Wikipedia article makes them sound like kind of a failure, but
the entire second half of the page is talking about all of their
acquisitions, more than one of which cost over $1 billion.
So what am I missing? How did this company get so much money?
bn-l wrote 8 hours 26 min ago:
Is boomer goodwill that valuable?
exasperaited wrote 8 hours 47 min ago:
I didn't know AOL was still alive.
Dead now though. Bending Spoons is the kiss of death.
olalonde wrote 9 hours 10 min ago:
It comes down to 50$ per monthly active user. I wonder how they plan to
recoup that.
gregjw wrote 9 hours 36 min ago:
Bending Spoons hoovering up old notable names
apparent wrote 9 hours 46 min ago:
> 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 something, via kitsch
and some genuinely useful offerings (like more email storage than
gmail, or something).
WillAdams wrote 7 hours 56 min ago:
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.
elAhmo wrote 10 hours 33 min ago:
Not sure how actively AOL is used, probably not really, but anything
Bending Spoon touches is entshitified soon after. They most recently
bought Komoot, and have already made questionable choices with a lot of
firings and promoting paid plans. Same has happened to Meetup.
It is a sad reality that this company keeps buying good products and
making it hostile for users who made it good, such as in the Komoot's
or Meetup's case.
reaperducer wrote 10 hours 25 min ago:
Not sure how actively AOL is used
Perhaps more than you think.
I was recently looking through an e-mail distribution list that my
company uses and was surprised how many @aol.coms were on there.
Easily hundreds.
People in the tech bubble vastly underestimate the number of
@aol.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, @earthlink.net and other legacy
e-mail addresses regular people still use. After all, it's their
e-mail address. Why would they ever change it?
tanepiper wrote 10 hours 34 min ago:
Proof we are in the weirdest timeline
sharkjacobs wrote 11 hours 35 min ago:
> 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.
I think there's something kind of astute here, which is that anyone who
is still using AOL products at this point is someone who is very
resistant to changing "email and web content properties" providers, and
is likely willing to passively tolerate additional enshittification and
monetization
silisili wrote 1 hour 39 min ago:
Yeah, for another 10 years or so tops.
On the other hand, they are the easiest demographic to scam out of
money, which seems fitting for a company like AOL.
wat10000 wrote 11 hours 38 min ago:
Interesting choice to give your company the name of a notorious fraud.
exasperaited wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
The name comes from the Matrix, supposedly. But yeah, they seem more
Uri Geller than anything else.
ano-ther wrote 11 hours 45 min ago:
Can someone enlighten me on the economics of such a deal?
From what I know about acquisitions, valuations are in the range of
10-12 times annual EBITDA (or perhaps even profits). This would mean
that AOL is making 150 million a year. Is that correct?
Invictus0 wrote 11 hours 42 min ago:
From the first sentence of the half-page article: "AOL still drives
hundreds of millions of dollars of free cash flow"
ottah wrote 12 hours 8 min ago:
Why would it even be worth that? Patents? Copyrights? Certainly not the
trademark.
mattmaroon wrote 11 hours 52 min ago:
Revenue. Theyâve 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.
jrflowers wrote 9 hours 46 min ago:
> they own LifeLock, Lastpass
AOL owns neither of these
dotcoma wrote 11 hours 30 min ago:
Then 1.5 B is a steal!
nostrademons wrote 12 hours 17 min ago:
Far cry from the AOL - Time Warner merger, where AOL purchased Time
Warner for $183B, creating a company with a combined $350B market cap.
jandrese wrote 11 hours 46 min ago:
Yes, there is much less money to set on fire this time.
ryandrake wrote 11 hours 2 min ago:
There are plenty of other companies setting much more money on fire
these days. The money furnace business model is as healthy as ever.
suzzer99 wrote 7 hours 51 min ago:
No, this time it's different.
/s
sdairs wrote 12 hours 26 min ago:
Least offensive Bending Spoons acquisition to date. I don't really mind
if they kill this one?
bluedino wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
I'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.
suzzer99 wrote 7 hours 51 min ago:
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.
kyleee wrote 4 hours 36 min ago:
Better price than better help. Probably better than better helpâs
counseling, too
logifail wrote 12 hours 19 min ago:
> I'm still using an email that is one of the AOL domains
ProTip: Honestly, just buy your own domain, control your own email
address(es)...
skrebbel wrote 12 hours 3 min ago:
Wow way to miss the point
logifail wrote 11 hours 37 min ago:
My domain registration is just over 25 years old... I guess I'm
also "legacy"?
I don't think I'm missing any point, thanks.
mlyle wrote 10 hours 49 min ago:
> My domain registration is just over 25 years old... I guess
I'm also "legacy"?
Mine too -- I mean, I had domains in 1994-1995.
Most people who have legacy AOL emails have them from more than
25 years ago-- indeed AOL was in decline by 2000.
And "protip: go back in time 30 years ago and tell your kid
self how to get a domain name, and navigate internic's
overcharging" isn't quite as practical to implement.
chrononaut wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
A lot of these old services used the email address as the fixed
user identifier making it much less likely (certainly for those
bucket of services) that he'd have a user-facing option of
changing it.
mlyle wrote 12 hours 17 min ago:
> > mostly for accessing legacy sites that were around at that
time.
einsteinx2 wrote 11 hours 43 min ago:
So change the email address on those accounts?
xp84 wrote 11 hours 30 min ago:
That's not always possible.
carlosjobim wrote 7 hours 6 min ago:
It is almost always possible.
strombofulous wrote 6 hours 40 min ago:
Email was often used as a primary key on older websites
zarzavat wrote 4 hours 39 min ago:
Originally websites had usernames and passwords. Username
was used as a primary key (such as this website).
Using the email address directly as the username/key is a
more modern trend (mid-late 00s). I believe this
coincided with the dominance of gmail where people would
have a forever email address. Before that, your email
address would regularly change if you moved
ISPs/schools/jobs so it wasn't a good identifier.
stabbles wrote 12 hours 41 min ago:
They bought Komoot, laid off 80% of the staff, but they still did a
major redesign of the app and website afterwards. I expected outages,
but so far it works like before.
NumberCruncher wrote 10 hours 12 min ago:
> They bought Komoot, laid off 80% of the staff, but they still did a
major redesign
This sounds like "doing a major redesign" would be something
positive. I'm a paying customer since ages and use the app on daily
basis. The new design adds nothing except confusion, at the same time
they broke the app on my smartwatch. I'm pretty much thinking about
switching apps because I don't see myself buying a new watch just
because of this.
Some companies would be better off with less bored designers. This is
exactly the same situation like a couple of years ago, when Spotify
every week rearranged the GUI and every week I had to relearn how I
can reach the same functionality. Back then I had to use the App
Store to give feedback, but I see now I can do the same directly in
the Komoot app. They're gonna have something to laugh about...
elAhmo wrote 10 hours 32 min ago:
It was mostly a cosmetic redesign, no functionality has been
significantly changed. Websites don't just stop working after people
are fired immediately, but they slowly die or become home for
parasites. Twitter is a great example of this.
IncreasePosts wrote 12 hours 19 min ago:
This might just be an accounting trick.
A lot of mature products act as a lottery ticket printing machine for
the rest of the company - spend the cash on some other concept and
hope that new thing becomes a stand alone product on its own.
Now that komoot is owned by a parent company, instead of printing
lottery tickets that other employees are scratching off, the cash is
being sent up to the parent company, who may just have employees in
another entity being funded by the money from komoot.
BozeWolf wrote 12 hours 33 min ago:
Except that it now has ten times the number of reminders popping up
to please subscribe for premium, even though I already have the world
maps package, so they got some of my money already.
everfrustrated wrote 13 hours 21 min ago:
Actual press release
URI [1]: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251029086811/en/Bendi...
jacobgkau wrote 13 hours 22 min ago:
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 Yahoo!. Some of the
still-relevant tech news sites like TechCrunch and Engadget were
apparently moved from AOL to being directly under Yahoo! a few years
ago. So I'm not too worried about AOL, but it's interesting how often
I've heard about Bending Spoons in relation to brands I know over the
past few years.
(Edit: AOL deleted all of my childhood emails back in the 2010s-- on an
account that had previously been part of a paid AOL family subscription
for years-- after I failed to sign into my account for more than 6
months, which also contributes to my current feeling that it's dead to
me.)
BryantD wrote 9 hours 35 min ago:
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.
Mistletoe wrote 20 min ago:
Is this why Criterion streaming quality is so poor? Itâs
completely unacceptable for a service that is supposed to pride
itself on loving movies and preserving them. Sometimes the scene
will be dark and I will descend into some sort of weird 8 bit pixel
world.
muglug wrote 4 hours 36 min ago:
Vimeo wonât âgo downâ anytime soon. It might get worse/more
expensive, but itâs not in imminent danger. And itâs also not
the only white-label provider around, either.
hobofan wrote 1 hour 31 min ago:
For customer facing streaming sites they also don't seem to be
the clear default choice. I think dropout.tv is one of the few
"secondary streaming services" to still be with Vimeo (and with
the strong overlap in their networks I'm sure they got a good
deal), while many other ones like Nebula evaluated them but went
with other providers.
It looks like the majority of their business is in employee
training portals for megacorps.
acomjean wrote 10 hours 37 min ago:
Meetup.. the promise of meetup was the organizers pay a fee so the
members donât have too.
My partner organized one a decade ago.
Iâm still a member of a couple but now theyâre 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.
jen729w wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
> Bending spoons, the name just sends up red flags as parlor
trickery.
'Spoon bender' was a deep insult in my circle when we were ~18. In
honour of the ur-bender, Uri.
netsharc wrote 8 hours 37 min ago:
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"...
nerdsniper wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
> I think it also advertises "get premium to see gender
ratios"...
Eww.
jacobgkau wrote 8 hours 55 min ago:
Yeah, I was a paying Meetup member for a short bit back around
2018-2019 when I hosted events with my own group, and have been a
very active attendee of others' groups (but no longer an organizer
of my own group) since 2020 on. I feel like the payment situation
hasn't actually gotten that much worse-- the price for organizers
that can be achieved with coupons is similar to what it was before,
and attendees don't actually have to pay-- but they've made it feel
a lot worse by making organizers dig for coupons and trying to
trick attendees into thinking they need to pay.
But I think most of those changes happened before Bending Spoons
bought Meetup. I don't think it was a situation where everything
was great, then Bending Spoons bought them and it started going to
crap (which I've heard some people in these groups retroactively
claiming recently).
riffraff wrote 10 hours 14 min ago:
I'm pretty sure the name is after the scene in "the matrix" (there
is no spoon etc).
fortran77 wrote 9 hours 45 min ago:
I was thinking more Uri Geller
Shared404 wrote 10 hours 44 min ago:
> Apollo Global Management
Oh hey, the company that orchestrated my first layoff!
Highly recommend Plunder (ISBN: 978-1541702103) for those who want to
learn more about the enshittification these companies bring.
vjvjvjvjghv wrote 11 hours 30 min ago:
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
jacobgkau wrote 8 hours 52 min ago:
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
since it's so close and claim that Bending Spoons raised the
prices.)
no_wizard wrote 4 hours 22 min ago:
Iâm 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
hshdhdhj4444 wrote 4 hours 6 min ago:
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.
jrochkind1 wrote 12 hours 44 min ago:
It sounds like Bending Spoons is where old tech products go to die? I
guess that's private equity for you.
insane_dreamer wrote 2 hours 39 min ago:
They bought Komoot recently.
bigbuppo wrote 7 hours 17 min ago:
They're the CA/Broadcom of as-a-service.
al_borland wrote 9 hours 25 min ago:
Yahoo tried that business model and it didnât go too well for
them. Maybe weâll see Bending Spoons but Tumblr and Flickr next.
no_wizard wrote 4 hours 26 min ago:
Tumblr was bought by Yahoo then sold for comparative peanuts to
Automattic, of Wordpress fame
lanthade wrote 6 hours 17 min ago:
Smugmug already bought Flickr a few years ago and that seems to
be going well.
sauercrowd wrote 11 hours 13 min ago:
I think the reality is most of these are already dead, and a PE
firm taking over is giving them one more chance
riffraff wrote 10 hours 19 min ago:
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.
zipy124 wrote 9 hours 47 min ago:
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 roll-up strategies (buy
loads of similar companies and merge, say car washes is big
right now for example, as well as dental, vet and family
doctor/GP practices) as well as utilising bucket loads of
leverage to amplify gains. This does not however make what
bending spoons is doing not PE.
rhetocj23 wrote 7 hours 34 min ago:
"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.
zaptheimpaler wrote 11 hours 56 min ago:
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.
vasco wrote 1 hour 40 min ago:
> Understandably people don't like Bending Spoons
I have no reason to believe they are nice guys, but I also don't
have the opposite. But it's interesting to me by default you
think they are in the wrong.
Supposedly the people that hired all those employees didn't know
what they were doing and mismanaged the company all the way to
needing to sell. Why are the bad guys the ones that actually are
willing to do the hard work of making the product profitable so
that it can keep existing?
The fault should be with the previous owners that drove it to the
ground leaving no more options, not bending spoons, imo. If it
was well managed it wouldn't need to be sold.
- VC funny money creating illusion of jobs for a bit = I sleep
- Turning it into a real money engine that can sustain the
product for years = real shit
andrewf wrote 7 hours 43 min ago:
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.
ThinkBeat wrote 7 hours 44 min ago:
Yes they have finally fixed some performance issues and that
is a huge win
axiolite wrote 9 hours 51 min ago:
> 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
I'd say it's only just slightly improved now, with a few bugs
fixed and features improved. Not at all worth the price
increase.
And it was horrible for a good 6 months after the acquisition...
Some days I could not login to the website for several hours.
Images in some notes wouldn't load some days. Searches would be
missing results. Bug reports sat idle for a couple months before
someone would respond asking for more info.
godzillabrennus wrote 10 hours 36 min ago:
They've kept the product alive but I don't know that it's
terribly improved... I've been a paid user since 2008. Switching
would be painful for me given how familiar I am with it but I
came close this last year when it stopped letting me stay logged
in on multiple Mac computers at the same time...
7tythr33 wrote 8 hours 35 min ago:
I was with Evernote since 07, and found it a doddle to ditch.
Export the lot, bring into Apple Notes or Bear. Or a
combination of the two. Sorted.
echelon wrote 11 hours 2 min ago:
Have you ever tried Obsidian? I feel like it's capable of
replacing the entire family of note and knowledge management
apps.
bayindirh wrote 10 hours 29 min ago:
I actively use Obsidian and Notion.
Obsidian is very good for technical and static knowledge bases.
I use their publish feature for my digital garden. Having local
markdown files and working on them is great. Obsidian is
basically a secret sauce over markdown file format.
On the other hand, dynamic content lives much better in Notion.
Databases, formulae, interconnection between other services
etc. makes it a great project management tool for my life.
However, due to the file format and everything can be
interconnected forms both a walled garden and moat at the same
time.
Both serve different niches and work very differently. So
neither one is a silver bullet by themselves for all scenarios.
But Obsidian is a great knowledge management tool if used
right, that's true.
timmg wrote 11 hours 4 min ago:
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.
criddell wrote 6 hours 21 min ago:
I like Evernote but it just isnât 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 canât renew at that Iâll have to
figure out how to migrate to Obsidian.
madog wrote 3 hours 16 min ago:
Migrating to Obsidian looks to be very easy now: [1] When I
converted many years ago it required 3rd party tools and was
slightly more involved (but still totally worth it).
URI [1]: https://help.obsidian.md/import/evernote
bayindirh wrote 10 hours 33 min ago:
I stopped using Evernote actively after they reduced a
formatting bug for their exported notes from Important to
Wishlist and then sold to Bending Spoons.
Bending Spoons not only fixed that particular bug, but added a
lot of useful features from other tools like "Block based
editing" from Notion.
They are actively improving the product in every way, and they
record short monthly recap videos to talk about the
improvements. They didn't milk and kill the product. It's an
interesting watch.
For me, the ship has sailed unfortunately. I divided that
Evernote corpus into two, and personal parts went to Notion and
technical part carried to Obsidian, and converted to a digital
garden.
I have no hard feelings for them, though. I wish them the best
of luck.
Invictus0 wrote 11 hours 38 min ago:
The fact that Evernote even still exists suggest Bending Spoons
has done something right
cestith wrote 12 hours 20 min ago:
Iâve heard the same evaluation of SoftBank, IBM, and Micro
Focus/OpenText/Rocket Software. Thereâs some truth in that, but
you can still get Visual Cobol even after a number of ownership
changes.
URI [1]: https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/products/cobol/visual...
dangus wrote 12 hours 34 min ago:
That seems to be the opposite of what the article suggests, they
seem to hold on long-term and invest in technology improvements.
RobotToaster wrote 12 hours 15 min ago:
Have you tried to use meetup recently? It's been turned into
garbage.
ChrisMarshallNY wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
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 werenât good.
zipy124 wrote 12 hours 20 min ago:
seems to be less invest, and more buy mature products and find
the minimum amount of money and people needed to maintain it,
whilst squeezing existing customers (which generally doesn't lead
to long-term stategy).
bayindirh wrote 9 hours 56 min ago:
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 time.
al_borland wrote 9 hours 22 min ago:
The hard part with any of these turn arounds is convincing
users that a product they once used and loved, which they
left after it betrayed them or they watched it die, is worth
going back to. The âcool factorâ is gone, nostalgia plays
are weak, and people donât like being burned twice by the
same product.
bayindirh wrote 9 hours 14 min ago:
That's true. For me, if I didn't move out of the Evernote
that much, I'd be still continuing to use it.
For me, it's not nostalgia or being afraid of being burned
again. It's just I have no real reason to migrate back at
this point.
zipy124 wrote 9 hours 37 min ago:
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
new users, but stem the flow and increase revenue from their
existing customer base who find exporting their data hard.
We've seen this before with lotus notes and other software
and we will see it again.
hshdhdhj4444 wrote 4 hours 11 min ago:
> 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
Youâre shifting the goalposts. Either theyâre doing the
bare minimum to maintain it, or theyâre 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 theyâre
maintaining a service that was otherwise failing and
therefore keeping existing users satisfied, or theyâre
growing and improving it.
Software is hard, so whether theyâre successful or not
remains to be seen. And turnaround stories almost never
happen in software so theyâre taking on an even harder
job, but so far thereâs little evidence that theyâre
been user hostile.
bayindirh wrote 9 hours 26 min ago:
Evernote was bleeding way before they have been bought by
Bending Spoons. They were trying to find their way around
the market, and Notion hit them like a train.
Considering the features they have added and polished, I
can't say they're not trying to add new users. With their
pricing strategy, they moved up tiers. They were looking
like bargain bin software, but with the new price, they are
not. They pulled a Chivas Regal with that move.
They are one of the companies which use AI in a saner way,
and inherit a powerful foundation, and they didn't kill any
integrations or export options.
The .enex format is still the best export format for these
kinds of tools, from my experience.
If you look at their changelogs, you can see that this is
not a "let's optimize and extort" operation. They have
recreated the tool, and listen user feedback intently.
As I said, I'm not an active Evernote user anymore, so I
have no skin in their game. I just want a tool I depended
this long to survive in a good shape.
ChrisArchitect wrote 13 hours 25 min ago:
Press release:
URI [1]: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251029086811/en/Bendi...
rootbear wrote 13 hours 36 min ago:
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.
WarOnPrivacy wrote 11 hours 20 min ago:
> 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.
Macha wrote 11 hours 30 min ago:
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 thatâs 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
mattmaroon wrote 11 hours 41 min ago:
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.
doodlebugging wrote 6 hours 57 min ago:
Earthlink remains great.
dotcoma wrote 11 hours 30 min ago:
Yahoo! Mail is still working
nticompass wrote 13 hours 48 min ago:
RIP AOL: 1983 - 2025
ChrisArchitect wrote 13 hours 52 min ago:
Everytime I hear Bending Spoons it's just ugggh. Too much money. It
feels so predatory. And for what? Absorb and abuse the userlist or
whatever they're actually trying to get ahold of.
rhetocj23 wrote 13 hours 56 min ago:
Bending Spoons is a joke company that buys company with hopes to
restructure them to meet some nonsensical financial numbers made up in
an excel spreadsheet.
ramon156 wrote 13 hours 5 min ago:
Still have no idea why they have so many job applications, they don't
actually hire.
lormayna wrote 12 hours 7 min ago:
AFAIK (I am Italian) they have a very long and difficult hiring
process, comparable to a FAANG.
jjice wrote 14 hours 18 min ago:
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.
JSR_FDED wrote 6 hours 46 min ago:
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.
DHPersonal wrote 14 hours 14 min ago:
Bending Spoons has taken at least one of the apps Iâve used and
stuffed them full of subscription models in a pretty blatant attempt
to wring as much money out of the existing user base before the app
becomes obsolete.
bonzini wrote 9 hours 8 min ago:
It's quite likely that the app was bleeding money before. Whether
they're wringing money or being responsible with their finances I
can't tell, but consider that the alternative could have been no
app at all.
avrionov wrote 14 hours 15 min ago:
Evernote was in decline in more than 5 years before their sale to
Bending Spoons. The sale didn't improve anything, because Bending
Spoons act as private equity. They layoffs, moving the job to cheaper
locations and increasing the prices.
ekjhgkejhgk wrote 13 hours 20 min ago:
For all the shit that PE gets, what you described is probably the
best outcome possible from the POV of shareholders. If done well it
should increase earnings per share. It's perhaps the best you can
hope for in a situation where the company has been in decline for 5
years and you have no levers to effect change as a small
shareholder.
This only works profitably because the users let themselves be
stepped on, of course. But then again users who put their notes
into a remote company's computer are those kind of people.
4ndrewl wrote 13 hours 50 min ago:
Someone's got to cover the costs of all those non-paying users.
20 years from Bending Spoons will be the final resting place of
Anthropic.
dep_b wrote 14 hours 23 min ago:
If I would work at AOL I would start polishing up my resumé. They
usually fire 80% after acquisition.
everfrustrated wrote 13 hours 27 min ago:
AOL was already owned by private equity so I'd imagine not much left
to cut.
flakiness wrote 14 hours 36 min ago:
This podcast episode has a couple of guests from that company.
Recommend to whoever interested in this company:
URI [1]: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rules-...
NickC25 wrote 14 hours 37 min ago:
what does AOL even do these days? genuinely curious.
pndy wrote 7 hours 56 min ago:
They got own branded Chromium with extra features:
URI [1]: https://youtu.be/z_NpZmk61Qo
Jordan-117 wrote 14 hours 21 min ago:
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 access to. It's a legacy of when
people paid them for their internet access -- no telling how many
retirees (or estates) continue paying each month.
underlipton wrote 13 hours 55 min ago:
"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.
LogicHound wrote 11 hours 34 min ago:
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.
cpach wrote 12 hours 4 min ago:
I hate to admit it, but itâs like me and my Digitalocean bills
(:
I donât want to think about how much money Iâve paid them
over the years for VMs I no longer need. A week ago I finally
pulled the plug on those servers. Not a moment too soonâ¦
veidr wrote 12 hours 16 min ago:
Ain't just boomers. Anybody with kids, and no existential
financial crisis. I just finally managed to cancel an unexamined
legacy subscription paid without a thought â after I noticed
WTF I have one Adobe subscription, not 3, across 2 cards ...
unfortunately the noticing part took like 3-4 years.
Additionally: it seems likely that it was the result of gas
station pump skimmers, just because the card in question had
never been used for any other kind of transaction.
palmotea wrote 12 hours 43 min ago:
> I still kick myself for spending 6x MVNO pricing on my cell
phone plan with a legacy carrier whose features I didn't need.
I have a friend who tried to switch to a MVNO (Cricket, I think)
to save money and immediately switched back. Even though both
companies were on the same network, the MVNO customers must have
had a lower priority, because their service level was noticeably
worse when literally the only thing that changed was the SIM
card.
xp84 wrote 11 hours 17 min ago:
There's a good reddit, i think NoContract, where you can go to
learn more about MVNOs. There are several tiers of them in
practice and they each have their own "catches" and
"advantages". I used Cricket many years ago when they had a
punishing speed cap. In the modern days some of these caps have
been relaxed, but as you suspected, prioritization is the main
way the actual carriers differentiate themselves from the MVNOs
that sell access to the same towers. The worst MVNOs have
terrible priority and in any well-populated area congestion
makes them super slow almost all the time.
The thing is, this is highly variable -- and also
geographically variable -- and some MVNOs can now offer similar
priority as a mainstream plan. US Mobile is one, which I've
been using for a couple years. Their neat advantage is that
they will sell you a SIM (or e-sim) that rides on your choice
of the big 3, and they'll also let you port between them
without any other change to your account. They call this
"Tele-Port". Some people will do that even just to go on a
vacation to a state with different "best carrier", since
there's nothing stopping you.
jandrese wrote 11 hours 42 min ago:
I switched from T-Mobile to Google Voice a few years ago for
this reason. With 5 lines on the plan the T-Mo version was way
too expensive. But then Google Voice raised their prices and
T-Mobile offered as much better multi-line discount and I ended
up switching back. Also, Google Voice tech support is absolute
dogshit.
havaloc wrote 12 hours 22 min ago:
Not all MVNO are the same in this regard, some sell the same
quality of service data tier.
nemothekid wrote 13 hours 42 min ago:
>"Unexamined legacy subscriptions paid without a thought," is
another way of saying, "Has too much money."
I constantly see ads for services like RocketMoney which helps
people find and cancel subscriptions. I could arguably be in the
"too much money" camp, but I couldn't imagine seeing an
unknown/unused charge on my credit card bill and not immediately
cancelling it. Nonetheless, RocketMoney seems like a widely used
product.
IncreasePosts wrote 12 hours 16 min ago:
Doesn't help that sometimes the charges are coded like *TST
VENDOR ACCT #1541*
I don't go over my bill every month but get a notification upon
every new charge, and sometimes the only way I know that a
charge I just put on at a store is the same one I got a
notification for is because the charge amount is some
relatively unique number.
plorkyeran wrote 13 hours 20 min ago:
A surprising number of people clearly simply do not look at
their credit card bills.
mikestew wrote 14 hours 27 min ago:
It wasn't until the end of last month that they finally turned off
dialup: [1] And I have people in my contacts whose active email ends
in "@aol.com".
URI [1]: https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discont...
ascagnel_ wrote 13 hours 41 min ago:
At least for my parents, there was a real fear of losing access to
their 20+ year old email address if they stopped paying. I don't
know if it was founded on anything, but it got them to keep paying
through a decade-plus of non-AOL broadband.
tartoran wrote 14 hours 34 min ago:
I wasn't even aware they were still around until a couple of days ago
I received an email from an aol.com domain. Best bet is they're just
a dead mall.
alberth wrote 14 hours 57 min ago:
At one time, AOL had a market cap of $200B
URI [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-internet...
everfrustrated wrote 13 hours 16 min ago:
We'll probably be saying the same about a lot of AI companies as
well....
dylan604 wrote 12 hours 32 min ago:
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?
com2kid wrote 4 hours 15 min ago:
Got my HM chair during the first wave of COVID lockdowns!
I'm guessing excess GPUs maybe? Everyone gets their own AI home
lab!
agoodusername63 wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
I'd be super down for GPUs to be cheaper again.
bongodongobob wrote 6 hours 30 min ago:
An rtx 3070 ti is like $300. If you want latest gen top of the
line, that's never been cheap.
einsteinx2 wrote 11 hours 40 min ago:
Lots and lots of powerful GPUs I would imagine.
Anarch157a wrote 11 hours 52 min ago:
dirt cheap Nvidia GPUs, perhaps ?
deepserket wrote 12 hours 22 min ago:
rack space i guess
mschild wrote 12 hours 24 min ago:
Hopefully some more chairs. Mine's running on 25 years now and it
has at least 1 broken part which is expensive to fix.
bsimpson wrote 13 hours 40 min ago:
At the turn of the millennium, they were valuable enough to buy
Warner Bros.
ascagnel_ wrote 13 hours 43 min ago:
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.".
JustExAWS wrote 11 hours 18 min ago:
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 âget into broadbandâ? They werenât going to be
able to create the last mile infrastructure. We see how that
worked out for Google.
URI [1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/goo...
sgerenser wrote 7 hours 38 min ago:
Time Warner Cable (now Spectrum) was literally one of the
pioneers of cable broadband. It seems like the best way for AOL
to âget into broadbandâ at the time might have been buying
Time Warner.
bdcravens wrote 14 hours 45 min ago:
When Verizon sold it and Yahoo, they were sold for less than 2% of
their peak market cap
URI [1]: https://www.axios.com/2021/05/04/verizon-aol-yahoo-valuation...
ec109685 wrote 12 hours 42 min ago:
That is a silly comparison. The alibaba assets of Yahoo were carved
out before it was sold to Verizon was worth $58.62B.
mooreds wrote 14 hours 57 min ago:
URI [1]: https://archive.is/Ouc0B
neom wrote 15 hours 2 min ago:
[1] Interesting comment from last year:
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476
A_Duck wrote 11 hours 18 min ago:
And clearly they're hard at work whitewashing that page... check the
Talk Page
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bending_Spoons
internetter wrote 10 hours 42 min ago:
Bending Spoons is correctly following the [[Wikipedia:Conflict of
interest]] process. They are pointing out information which could
be improved and are requesting an independent party confirm they
are correct. They disclosed their conflict. All companies are
allowed and encouraged to do this. Not many do.
Source: I'm a wikipedia editor unaffiliated with bending spoons.
Edit: I see another complaint about IP editing. I am looking into
this.
croisillon wrote 12 hours 6 min ago:
oh wow and they got Vimeo and WeTransfer too!?
dotcoma wrote 11 hours 36 min ago:
And Komoot and Meetup, and of course Evernote.
kryptoncalm wrote 8 hours 55 min ago:
Relevant coverage of some acquisitions doesnât bode well for
AOL staff:
1. [1] 2.
URI [1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-lay-off-75...
URI [2]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/route-planning-app...
dancc wrote 13 hours 21 min ago:
Someone wrote about Bending Spoons' history and playbook: [1] 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-call schemes at all.
Engineers are encouraged to think through all corner cases to ensure
robustness, knowing there is no fallback like an on-call team.
URI [1]: https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma...
hamdingers wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
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.
everfrustrated wrote 13 hours 17 min ago:
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.
Barrin92 wrote 11 hours 25 min ago:
>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.
luismedel wrote 9 hours 38 min ago:
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.
everfrustrated wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
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.
veidr wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
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?
RajT88 wrote 12 hours 5 min ago:
Considering AOL's business model was to keep old folks paying
for dialup, and once they moved off of dialup continue paying
for access to the AOL portal, a good chunk of their user base
may already be dead and still being billed.
mikeyouse wrote 12 hours 29 min ago:
I think theyâre actually named after the scene in the matrix
where the little kid (and then Neo) can bend the spoon with
their mind.
veidr wrote 11 hours 33 min ago:
Oh! LOL that's admittedly cooler than
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Geller
NetOpWibby wrote 10 hours 27 min ago:
I've heard this name on the radio in GTA2 for years but I
never looked up the name. Fascinating.
qingcharles wrote 13 hours 24 min ago:
I'm still waiting to see how they complete destroy Vimeo they just
bought.
pavel_lishin wrote 13 hours 59 min ago:
> 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.
xp84 wrote 11 hours 25 min ago:
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.
philipallstar wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
Almost anywhere in America is also cheaper than California.
pavel_lishin wrote 6 hours 4 min ago:
Yep. The NYC area is one exception. I've worked at a company
that was acquired, and they laid off quite a few of the
NYC-area employees. Rumor had it that some of them were making
more than their managers, and their managers' managers.
marstall wrote 13 hours 29 min ago:
How does that possibly work? How do they continue with zero of the
staff?
dangus wrote 12 hours 32 min ago:
Transitional severance agreements to have the current staff
transfer operations to new staff.
amiga386 wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
Simple. They get new staff whose job is to shove intrusive
surveillance and advertising into the product and push out an
update, they don't have to support or develop the product.
The company bought the product to bilk money out of its existing
users. They throw the product in the bin once all the users have
gone.
Sadly, some ants get infected with corydceps. Tragic for the ant,
but the other ants get it the fuck away from their colony,
because they don't want to be next.
mtgentry wrote 11 hours 52 min ago:
As an Evernote user, Bending Spoons has been iterating fast
over the past couple years to improve the product. Itâs much
better than it used to be.
sentientslug wrote 8 hours 33 min ago:
What the value prop of continuing to use Evernote versus
other newer solutions like Notion? Interested to hear from
someone still using the product
mtgentry wrote 59 min ago:
Notion is more than I need. 99% of the time I just need to
write something down for later.
everfrustrated wrote 13 hours 20 min ago:
They replaced them with staff in Italy. Bending Spoons is an
Italian (Milan) company.
They wanted the product not the developers.
kbar13 wrote 14 hours 6 min ago:
holy smokes this is worse for consumers and employees than being
bought by PE
JohnClark1337 wrote 14 hours 40 min ago:
So companies go there to die
DIR <- back to front page