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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.
      - hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
        > find the minimum amount of money and people needed to maintain it > you must improve the software to keep users from just up and quitting 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.
    - al_borland 1y ago
      The hard part with any of these turn arounds is convincing users that a product they once used and loved, which they left after it betrayed them or they watched it die, is worth going back to. The “cool factor” is gone, nostalgia plays are weak, and people don’t like being burned twice by the same product.
      - bayindirh 1y ago
        That's true. For me, if I didn't move out of the Evernote that much, I'd be still continuing to use it. For me, it's not nostalgia or being afraid of being burned again. It's just I have no real reason to migrate back at this point.
- 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

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.
    - hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
      > find the minimum amount of money and people needed to maintain it > you must improve the software to keep users from just up and quitting 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.
  - al_borland 1y ago
    The hard part with any of these turn arounds is convincing users that a product they once used and loved, which they left after it betrayed them or they watched it die, is worth going back to. The “cool factor” is gone, nostalgia plays are weak, and people don’t like being burned twice by the same product.
    - bayindirh 1y ago
      That's true. For me, if I didn't move out of the Evernote that much, I'd be still continuing to use it. For me, it's not nostalgia or being afraid of being burned again. It's just I have no real reason to migrate back at this point.
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