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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

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.)

deleted 1y ago
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jrochkind1 1y ago
It sounds like Bending Spoons is where old tech products go to die? I guess that's private equity for you.
- dangus 1y ago
  That seems to be the opposite of what the article suggests, they seem to hold on long-term and invest in technology improvements.
  - zipy124 1y 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 1y 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.
      - zipy124 1y 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.
        bayindirh 1y 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.
        1y ago
  - RobotToaster 1y ago
    Have you tried to use meetup recently? It's been turned into garbage.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 1y 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 weren’t good.
- cestith 1y ago
  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-cobol-personal-edition https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/products/cobol/visual-c...
- zaptheimpaler 1y 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.
  - Invictus0 1y ago
    The fact that Evernote even still exists suggest Bending Spoons has done something right
  - timmg 1y 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.
    - bayindirh 1y 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.
    - criddell 1y ago
      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.
- sauercrowd 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
      - riffraff 1y ago
- al_borland 1y ago
  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.
  - lanthade 1y ago
    Smugmug already bought Flickr a few years ago and that seems to be going well.
  - no_wizard 1y ago
    Tumblr was bought by Yahoo then sold for comparative peanuts to Automattic, of Wordpress fame
  - riffraff 1y ago
    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.
- bigbuppo 1y ago
  They're the CA/Broadcom of as-a-service.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  They bought Komoot recently.
- 7moritz7 1y ago
  They are digital private equity essentially
vjvjvjvjghv 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    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
    - hshdhdhj4444 1y 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.
      - no_wizard 1y ago
        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.
Shared404 1y 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.
acomjean 1y ago
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.
- riffraff 1y ago
  I'm pretty sure the name is after the scene in "the matrix" (there is no spoon etc).
  - fortran77 1y ago
    I was thinking more Uri Geller
- jacobgkau 1y 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).
- netsharc 1y 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"...
  - 1y ago
BryantD 1y 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.
- muglug 1y ago
  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.
  - hobofan 1y 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.
    - magarnicle 1y ago
      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.
    - BryantD 1y ago
      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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jrochkind1 1y ago

It sounds like Bending Spoons is where old tech products go to die? I guess that's private equity for you.

dangus 1y ago
That seems to be the opposite of what the article suggests, they seem to hold on long-term and invest in technology improvements.
- zipy124 1y 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 1y 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.
    - zipy124 1y 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.
      - bayindirh 1y 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.
      - 1y ago
- RobotToaster 1y ago
  Have you tried to use meetup recently? It's been turned into garbage.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y 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 weren’t good.
cestith 1y ago
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-cobol-personal-edition https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/products/cobol/visual-c...
zaptheimpaler 1y 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.
- Invictus0 1y ago
  The fact that Evernote even still exists suggest Bending Spoons has done something right
- timmg 1y 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.
  - bayindirh 1y 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.
  - criddell 1y ago
    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.
sauercrowd 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
    - riffraff 1y ago
al_borland 1y ago
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.
- lanthade 1y ago
  Smugmug already bought Flickr a few years ago and that seems to be going well.
- no_wizard 1y ago
  Tumblr was bought by Yahoo then sold for comparative peanuts to Automattic, of Wordpress fame
- riffraff 1y ago
  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.
bigbuppo 1y ago
They're the CA/Broadcom of as-a-service.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
They bought Komoot recently.
7moritz7 1y ago
They are digital private equity essentially

vjvjvjvjghv 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  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
  - hshdhdhj4444 1y 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.
    - no_wizard 1y ago
      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.

Shared404 1y 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.

acomjean 1y ago

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.

riffraff 1y ago
I'm pretty sure the name is after the scene in "the matrix" (there is no spoon etc).
- fortran77 1y ago
  I was thinking more Uri Geller
jacobgkau 1y 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).
netsharc 1y 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"...
- 1y ago

BryantD 1y 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.

muglug 1y ago
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.
- hobofan 1y 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.
  - magarnicle 1y ago
    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.
  - BryantD 1y ago
    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.