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.
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.".
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 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
> 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
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.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadInteresting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-intern...
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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
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.