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.)
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.
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...
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).
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
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.
> 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.
> 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]
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.
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.
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.
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 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!)
Considering AOL's business model was to keep old folks paying for dialup, and once they moved off of dialup continue paying for access to the AOL portal, a good chunk of their user base may already be dead and still being billed.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
>"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.
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.
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.
I hate to admit it, but it’s like me and my Digitalocean bills (:
I don’t want to think about how much money I’ve paid them over the years for VMs I no longer need. A week ago I finally pulled the plug on those servers. Not a moment too soon…
At least for my parents, there was a real fear of losing access to their 20+ year old email address if they stopped paying. I don't know if it was founded on anything, but it got them to keep paying through a decade-plus of non-AOL broadband.
I wasn't even aware they were still around until a couple of days ago I received an email from an aol.com domain. Best bet is they're just a dead mall.
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.
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.
https://archive.is/Ouc0B
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.)
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.
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.
Have you ever tried Obsidian? I feel like it's capable of replacing the entire family of note and knowledge management apps.
The fact that Evernote even still exists suggest Bending Spoons has done something right
I think the reality is most of these are already dead, and a PE firm taking over is giving them one more chance
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...
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).
Have you tried to use meetup recently? It's been turned into garbage.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
[dead]
Far cry from the AOL - Time Warner merger, where AOL purchased Time Warner for $183B, creating a company with a combined $350B market cap.
Yes, there is much less money to set on fire this time.
There are plenty of other companies setting much more money on fire these days. The money furnace business model is as healthy as ever.
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.
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.
Transitional severance agreements to have the current staff transfer operations to new staff.
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.
holy smokes this is worse for consumers and employees than being bought by PE
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.
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
Considering AOL's business model was to keep old folks paying for dialup, and once they moved off of dialup continue paying for access to the AOL portal, a good chunk of their user base may already be dead and still being billed.
>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.
I'm still waiting to see how they complete destroy Vimeo they just bought.
oh wow and they got Vimeo and WeTransfer too!?
And Komoot and Meetup, and of course Evernote.
So companies go there to die
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...
That is a silly comparison. The alibaba assets of Yahoo were carved out before it was sold to Verizon was worth $58.62B.
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?
Hopefully some more chairs. Mine's running on 25 years now and it has at least 1 broken part which is expensive to fix.
Lots and lots of powerful GPUs I would imagine.
dirt cheap Nvidia GPUs, perhaps ?
rack space i guess
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...
At the turn of the millennium, they were valuable enough to buy 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 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.
Someone's got to cover the costs of all those non-paying users.
20 years from Bending Spoons will be the final resting place of Anthropic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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
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
> 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.
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
Actual press release https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251029086811/en/Ben...
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?
From the first sentence of the half-page article: "AOL still drives hundreds of millions of dollars of free cash flow"
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.
> 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.
Not all MVNO are the same in this regard, some sell the same quality of service data tier.
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.
>"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.
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.
I hate to admit it, but it’s like me and my Digitalocean bills (:
I don’t want to think about how much money I’ve paid them over the years for VMs I no longer need. A week ago I finally pulled the plug on those servers. Not a moment too soon…
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".
At least for my parents, there was a real fear of losing access to their 20+ year old email address if they stopped paying. I don't know if it was founded on anything, but it got them to keep paying through a decade-plus of non-AOL broadband.
I wasn't even aware they were still around until a couple of days ago I received an email from an aol.com domain. Best bet is they're just a dead mall.
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.
Then 1.5 B is a steal!
Interesting choice to give your company the name of a notorious fraud.
Least offensive Bending Spoons acquisition to date. I don't really mind if they kill this one?
RIP AOL: 1983 - 2025
Press release: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251029086811/en/Ben...
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.
Still have no idea why they have so many job applications, they don't actually hire.
AFAIK (I am Italian) they have a very long and difficult hiring process, comparable to a FAANG.