AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
axios.com282 points by jmsflknr a day ago
282 points by jmsflknr a day 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.)
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.
Bending Spoons also bought Brightcove so they actually own two of the white label streaming providers.
Would not be surprised to see the two merged into a single service.
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.
The Nebula apps are pretty bad. Vimeo white label has issues but the app experience is much better than whomever Nebula are using.
One reason Vimeo is a good deal is that they charge for video transcoding by the minute, not by the file size. So you can upload full ProRes 4K movies and it doesn't cost the earth.
I dug in a bit and did a little research. Criterion and Dropout, as mentioned, use Vimeo. So does Arrow's streaming service (cult films, mostly). From there on in it gets even more fringe: Taskmaster (the British game show) has a streaming service built on Vimeo, the Z-movie titans Troma and Full Moon Features use Vimeo, and so on. So not insanely crucial but I still think it's a better world in which those services can keep doing what they do.
Yes, there are alternatives. Nonetheless, the niche streamers I'm thinking of would find it a moderate burden to move to a different provider and they're operating on slim margins as is.
Dropout as well I think.
Yep. Vimeo is the tech infrastructure from the original collegehumor, and Dropout still uses it.
Is this why Criterion streaming quality is so poor? It’s 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.
Yes, yes it is. And there was some sort of bug that pushed the top quality down to 720p last month.
Is there any streaming option with non dogshit quality?
For streaming movies and TV at reasonable prices? No, but you can DIY with Plex and get Blu-ray quality
Dont do Plex! Closed source that leaks what you upload to Plex. And they're owned by big media - so only time they start suing users for files they know they have.
Instead, check out FLOSS server Jellyfin!
That’s alarming. Do you have any sources where I can learn more about this?
What does "uploading" have to do with using Plex? As far as I was aware, My media is sitting less than a meter from me right now. Does Plex upload my content to a server without asking or something?
Plex has a lot of dubious partnerships with companies like Lionsgate and Kliener Perkins but is not owned by Big Media
With Netflix, there are never visible artifacts, play/pause always works within a second. I am sure I'm not always getting HD but I wouldn't call it dogshit. All the other streaming services though, random hiccups are common, and the UI is slow enough that it's not just play/pause, it often takes 30 seconds just to resume what I was previously watching if I closed the browser tab.
> With Netflix, there are never visible artifacts
Uwotm8. Any sufficiently dark scene will have artifacts out the wazoo.
Not to mention other stuff like subtitles mentioning the wrong spoken language (ie. the character is speaking French, but the subtitle say they're speaking English), the UI unloads after some time, and the only action you can take is to start the video (you can't go back), the button for info when hovering over a card doesn't work half time time, video controls disappear at the end of an episode while transitioning to the next (the 'next episode' button is present and animating, but you can't pause the video at the credits in that moment), etc... In short, the UI is shit and so is the video quality.
Vimeo isn't dogshit. In fact it's one of the only quality ones I've found which also support HDR / Dolby Vision.
Criterion is an extra layer below dogshit. Kanopy, which is free with your library card, blows it out of the water.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
Sounds like you've already moved on from it, but if people are looking for a pretty seamless Evernote replacement, Joplin (open source) is pretty much an exact replica of Evernote and can import Evernote data.
The annoyance I have when considering a move away from Evernote is that none of the recommended alternatives have IFTTT support.
(Although having said that, I do drop most of my notes into iOS/macOS Drafts these days which also doesn't have IFTTT support. But I could probably lash something up with webhooks and SQLite if absolutely necessary.)
From what i remember they did the same at wetransfer. Doubling pricings without notification.
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 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.
I get the attraction of all these various online apps where you're supposed to be able to store everything in one place. But they're single points of failure. In spite of the downsides, I just use text notes and take pics of, e.g., conference slides, on my phone. But, honestly, I don't really refer back to the vast majority of that stuff anyway.
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).
Two things I suspect I'll miss from Evernote is their web clipper and their OCR.
Last time I tried the Obsidian web clipper, it was pretty rough. It would drop images or include ads. I found the Evernote clipper to be pretty much flawless.
Evernote's OCR capabilities are also great. Somehow it's able to do a better job of recognizing my handwriting than even I can do sometimes. Last I checked, Obsidian isn't very good at this which is strange because the two big platforms — Windows and MacOS — both have excellent OCR APIs they could use for free.
Wait a sec — you're saying you'll take the time and trouble to "... figure out how to migrate to Obsidian" rather than pay the $70-$80 renewal premium over what you paid last year? Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose you spend a total of 3 hours from start to finish doing the migration. That's the equivalent of being paid $25/hour in lieu of paying the Evernote full price renewal as opposed to what you paid on sale last year. I have a feeling you would not consider that close to being what your time is worth nor to what you're paid in your day job.
You might be surprised to know that I also mow my lawn, I clean home, I cook sometimes, I do laundry, I drive myself to work, and I sometimes even watch TV, spend time on HN, or play video games.
Aside from the fact that such calculations aren't necessarily applicable anyway, it is incorrect because they would most likely have continued to use and have to pay for Evernote for more than just the one year.
I'm trying to imagine a product manager calling me to say, "Hi, we just bought this product you use, we're raising prices and firing the dev team. But hahahaha, you can't quit us, I have a spreadsheet here that says your time escaping our clutches will cost you more than paying the extortion fee to cover us buying the tool and the profit we need. Tough luck, but you have no logical alternative."
I'm not sure that my relationship with tools is so bloodless that it is only driven by dollars, cents, and minutes. I'm not sure I have to clench my teeth and write that product manager a cheque.
> 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
> by default you think they are in the wrong.
They are an acquisition company fueled almost solely by VC loans. They want big returns, you don't get those from normal business, but you do from squeezing the life out of something.
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.
Have you ever tried Obsidian? I feel like it's capable of replacing the entire family of note and knowledge management apps.
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.
I’ve heard the same evaluation of SoftBank, IBM, and Micro Focus/OpenText/Rocket Software. There’s some truth in that, but you can still get Visual Cobol even after a number of ownership changes. https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/products/cobol/visual-c...
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.
I may recall wrongly, but IMO Yahoo used to buy hyped companies for a ton of money and let them die, it was the opposite strategy.
I think the reality is most of these are already dead, and a PE firm taking over is giving them one more chance
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 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.
But PE firms don't have their own workforce, Bending Spoon does, which is why their model differs from, say, Apollo.
The fact they use some of the same tools doesn't mean they are doing the same thing. The majority of Blending Spoon's employees are devs, not finance people.
"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.
That seems to be the opposite of what the article suggests, they seem to hold on long-term and invest in technology improvements.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 “cool factor” is gone, nostalgia plays are weak, and people don’t like being burned twice by the same product.
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.
Meetup.. the promise of meetup was the organizers pay a fee so the members don’t have too.
My partner organized one a decade ago.
I’m still a member of a couple but now they’re 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.
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).
> 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.
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 since it's so close and claim that Bending Spoons raised the prices.)
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.
IMO, they would have been best as a white label provider with good editing tools.
Granted, I'm armchair CEO postulating about it, but that always seemed like a good niche that would cover the rest of the subsets in a variety of ways, especially if they had embedded a monetization program via ads like YouTube as a sub-brand for creators. A possible 1-2 punch to sustainable revenue.
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.
> 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)...
> > mostly for accessing legacy sites that were around at that time.
So change the email address on those accounts?
That's not always possible.
It is almost always possible.
Email was often used as a primary key on older websites
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.
Yes, and it's possible to change that e-mail. The only place I've encountered which doesn't is Alibaba.
ChatGPT is another.
Bambu Labs online account has the same restriction for some reason as I found out the hard way, though I had thought that was extremely rare.
Wow way to miss the point
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.
> 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.
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.
Far cry from the AOL - Time Warner merger, where AOL purchased Time Warner for $183B, creating a company with a combined $350B market cap.
My wife's grandparents use and pay for AOL. I think they pay for a premium package? All I know is that it handles their internet, web browsing, and email.
One day they had issues setting it up, so they call a help line. They ended up being scammed, and paid this person ~$200 to fix their issue. After it happened, they immediately called me up and asked if they were scammed.
I told them that unfortunately, they were. Surprisingly though, the scammer did actually fix their issue.
Are you using the word scam to describe AOL overcharging for helpdesk service or was the helpdesk not affiliated with AOL and they just happened to know how to fix the problem (or maybe they caused it?)?
My apologies, I should've been clear!
AOL doesn't charge for any helpdesk service at all. It explicitly says on their website that all helpdesk services are free and they'll never charge you.
The scam was that the scammers had a fake helpdesk service that showed up that my wife's grandparents ended up paying for.
The scammers did actually fix the issue, but the scam was that the grandparents should have never been charged!
Was it really a scam then? Or just extremely overpriced?
My apologies, I should've been more clear!
The scam was that this service is actually free provided by AOL. The grandparents shouldn't have ever been charged, they just ended up finding scammers that actually knew how to fix the issue.
At one time, AOL had a market cap of $200B
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-intern...
When Verizon sold it and Yahoo, they were sold for less than 2% of their peak market cap
https://www.axios.com/2021/05/04/verizon-aol-yahoo-valuation...
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?
I'd be super down for GPUs to be cheaper again.
Monkey's paw: GPUs will be cheap but there will be no new ones sold for ten years. Basically Mad Max with computer parts.
An rtx 3070 ti is like $300. If you want latest gen top of the line, that's never been cheap.
$300 would buy a current generation midrange card not long ago. That much for a 2 generation old midrange card is outrageous.
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...
They couldn't buy the last mile, but they could have gone for an infrastructure play. You buy your broadband from the local phone or cable company, and they give you an AOL email account, the default portal is aol.com, they nudge you towards the all-in-one AOL client, etc. The local cable companies don't have to figure out anything but being a dumb pipe, and they can get a revenue stream less coupled to selling overpriced dialup. (They did have a "bring your own connection" plan at some point, but it was probably an easier sell to include it as part of a $75/month DSL/cable subscription rather than as an independent line item.
Maybe use their temporary dial-up riches to line up long-term rights to premium content. I suspect before YouTube took off, nobody knew the potential for online video, and they could have probably locked in contracts at very low prices.
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.
Almost anywhere in America is also cheaper than California.
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.
> Rumor had it that some of them were making more than their managers, and their managers' managers.
So on par with actual value created.
It's pretty wild to describe Italy as 'Eastern Europe'
They didn't describe Italy as Eastern Europe, they said you can hire in Eastern Europe for far less. Eg. you can do that from Italy and keep people in the same timezone and relatively close by.
How does that possibly work? How do they continue with zero of the staff?
They replaced them with staff in Italy. Bending Spoons is an Italian (Milan) company.
They wanted the product not the developers.
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.
As an Evernote user, Bending Spoons has been iterating fast over the past couple years to improve the product. It’s much better than it used to be.
What the value prop of continuing to use Evernote versus other newer solutions like Notion? Interested to hear from someone still using the product
Notion is more than I need. 99% of the time I just need to write something down for later.
I have tried them all, and ended up with a fileofax rip off, and a box of index cards!
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-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.
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.
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.
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
I've heard this name on the radio in GTA2 for years but I never looked up the name. Fascinating.
>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.
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.
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.
On calls are also the norm in Europe.
We get time and money compensation for that.
Is anyone surprised that you can build stuff that require no support for years? I do, know people that do. Thinking about robustness is the default path.
oh wow and they got Vimeo and WeTransfer too!?
And Komoot and Meetup, and of course Evernote.
Relevant coverage of some acquisitions doesn’t bode well for AOL staff:
1. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-lay-off-75-185...
2. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/route-planning-app-kom...
So companies go there to die
Another way to look at it: When a companies bubble bursts, when people realise that it is just a note taking app (or whatever), and that its never going to grow 10x again, VC investors want shot of it.
Without a constant stream of new investment, the company simply can't afford to be loaded up with SV staff producing features that nobody will pay for. Bending Spoons change the business model to 'normal business'. They move to much cheaper European staff, stop work on nonsense 'features', concentrate instead on servicing their existing customers with a stable platform and well thought out incremental advances.
So they take businesses that are dying because nobody will give them free money any more, and make them into real sustainable businesses that can stand on their own two feet?
And clearly they're hard at work whitewashing that page... check the Talk Page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bending_Spoons
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.
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 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.
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.
Bending Spoons has taken at least one of the apps I’ve 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.
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?
Dark-patterns all the way.
They have tiny internal teams split per product with the sole purpose of hiding the "not now" button as much as possible to increase trials and purchases.
Absolutely cancer of a company, run away if you see their name on anything.
Maybe they just run companies like they should be run when VC money runs out. Which is somewhat hard for consumers that have gotten used to getting everything for free.
ZIRP era with free flowing money, probably did lot of bad in this respect. Running products cost actual money. And those surviving on advertising is more limited group.
I guess by offering consistent long term cashflows you can attract classic institutional investors, and banks. Europe is much better at that than it is at finding VC cash for a moonshot
I noticed that, too. If one only had the wikipedia article to go on, it would appear that they made way too much money with the covid app for Italy. Which is probably true, but probably not billions?! So, after reading another article[1] (which does not really give strong pointers but leads to) my conclusion would be that they simply somehow became a darling for investors and could finance all these big acquisitions.
[1]https://weeklysiliconvalley.com/bending-spoons-from-humble-b...
> 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).
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.
If I would work at AOL I would start polishing up my resumé. They usually fire 80% after acquisition.
AOL was already owned by private equity so I'd imagine not much left to cut.
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.
> 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...
>Some companies would be better off with less bored designers.
The comment you are replying to says they laid off 80% of them!
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.
Alright, if anyone is still using AOL: get the hell out of it. Bending Spoons is probably one of the companies I loathe the most from what I know from outside and even more from insider's knowledge.
Anything they touch turns into dark pattern ridden turds.
I honestly wish there was a page with all the products they purchased, so that I can avoid them forever.
This podcast episode has a couple of guests from that company. Recommend to whoever interested in this company: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
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. https://pca.st/episode/11464df6-e1cc-4b8f-a64d-a4de9a9ec170
It comes down to 50$ per monthly active user. I wonder how they plan to recoup that.
A good effort, but not at the level of “Twitter Acquires Magic Pony” or the unmatchable “Salesforce Acquires Slack”.
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.
Looking at the portfolio of businesses that Bending Spoons has, it's like a who's-who of 2010s startups.
It'll be interesting to see what they do with AOL. That business itself was an amalgamation of other businesses over time, so they may find a mirror image of themselves once they start to dig into the weeds.
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
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
That’s true. I mean it does get hacked every week, but it does still function.
> 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.
Actual press release https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251029086811/en/Ben...
what does AOL even do these days? genuinely curious.
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.
"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.
>"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.
A surprising number of people clearly simply do not look at their credit card bills.
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.
> 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.
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.
The only time deprioritization has been a problem for me is when I've run out of data on my limited plan. With the major carrier, it was still usable; with the MVNO, it was not. As long as you stay below your plan limit (or, for those on unlimited, don't try to tether and use hundreds of gigabytes a month), it's essentially the same service.
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.
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.
It's only easy to miss if you're irresponsible. Having enough (some would say, "more than enough") money makes being irresponsible less painful.
The way you are using irresponsible is perverse. e.g. Being Irresponsible in this context would be remortgaging your house, while unemployed and using all the money to buy gadgets.
Forgetting that you have a small amount deducted for a service you are no longer using, isn't. It is minor oversight.
The way that language is abused by people when it comes to these sorts of subjects is bordering on semantic manipulation. Which in itself is a form of deceit.
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 — 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.
It wasn't until the end of last month that they finally turned off dialup:
https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discont...
And I have people in my contacts whose active email ends in "@aol.com".
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.
>promoting paid plans
You might say, however, that a business that wants you to actually for a product is a real sustainable business.
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?
Part of me wonders how much of that 1.5B is the value of all those chat logs.
Chat logs from AOL Instant Messenger, which shut down in 2017, and was obsolete for almost a decade prior to that?
And in common with other first wave chat products had entirely client side chat logs anyway.
Honestly I'm shocked that AOL is still worth that much.
Bending Spoons hoovering up old notable names
Proof we are in the weirdest timeline
End of an era. (Well, OK, the era ended long ago, this is just the long-delayed tombstone I guess). Those of us coming out of the pre-boom internet always sneered, but those floppies they'd pack into every magazine were the gateway for the rest of the world.
Even though we all complained (perhaps not in so many words) about the eternal September and the damage done by opening things up to a larger number of people, the early AOLers were paradigms of intellectual curiosity and urbanity compared to what came later.
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.
> they own LifeLock, Lastpass
AOL owns neither of these
You’re right, I guess they sell plans to seniors that include those bundled in but don’t own them.
> 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
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.
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?
RIP AOL: 1983 - 2025
Footnote: Netscape.
Least offensive Bending Spoons acquisition to date. I don't really mind if they kill this one?
Interesting choice to give your company the name of a notorious fraud.
The name comes from the Matrix, supposedly. But yeah, they seem more Uri Geller than anything else.
I didn't know AOL was still alive.
Dead now though. Bending Spoons is the kiss of death.
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.
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.
Is boomer goodwill that valuable?
[flagged]
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.