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- Hacker News
- 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.by stabbles
- 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.by BozeWolf
- 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.by elAhmo
- 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.
- > 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...
- > 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).
by apparent - 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.
by WillAdams - If I would work at AOL I would start polishing up my resumé. They usually fire 80% after acquisition.by dep_b
- AOL was already owned by private equity so I'd imagine not much left to cut.
- 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?
by jlarocco - 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...
by Tarsul - 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 moonshotby jimnotgym
- 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.
by Ekaros - 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.
by xandrius - 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.
by jjice - 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.by JSR_FDED
- 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.by DHPersonal
- 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.by avrionov
- 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.
by cyrialize - Was it really a scam then? Or just extremely overpriced?by Thorrez
- 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?)?by x187463
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons
Interesting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476
by neom - And clearly they're hard at work whitewashing that page... check the Talk Page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bending_Spoonsby A_Duck
- So companies go there to die
- oh wow and they got Vimeo and WeTransfer too!?by croisillon
- I'm still waiting to see how they complete destroy Vimeo they just bought.by qingcharles
- holy smokes this is worse for consumers and employees than being bought by PEby kbar13
- 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.
by dancc - > 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.
by pavel_lishin - At one time, AOL had a market cap of $200B
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-intern...
by alberth