[gtowey]

> Their goal might be be to acquire, dramatically cut costs, and then run the product for as long as they can at a profit before breaking it down and selling it off

In the 80's people who did this were known as "corperate raiders". Nowadays it's just called business.

[thatguy0900]

I've heard vulture capitalist used to refer to that too

[t1234s]

"corporate raiders" are a definitely real thing.

[everfrustrated]

That usually means stripping the company for parts. Bending Spoons is just trying to run the company sustainably.

[munk-a]

Vimeo employed somewhere north of a thousand people a year ago with 28% being in the engineering team (according to random google results - this isn't an area I have personal knowledge of). If they dropped from around 300 people to 15 that sounds like gutting - not trimming.

[everfrustrated]

They will be hiring up but not the same people. Bending Spoons tends to replace high silicon valley wages with high Italy wages which is a considerable saving.

[johnnyanmac]

This is why I can't take any anti-immigration sentiments seriously in this country. An american founded company runs a business for 20 years, sells it off overseas, and the new owners kick all Americans out of the equation.

Response from America: "well that's just business, I guess". It was never about preserving American labor.

[everfrustrated]

If the company was profitable they wouldn't have needed to sell. It was always living on borrowed time. If a US owner bought it they'd have done exactly the same thing (layoffs) albeit possibly with new jobs in a different state than country.

[kelnos]

Typical bean counters, firing all the people with institutional knowledge up front, and then hoping their cheaper labor can figure things out.

Meanwhile, the users are the ones who lose out. Classic.

[horsawlarway]

It sounds like they're trying to extract as much money as possible from a SaaS subscription service that's no longer actually paying any devs.

From my perspective as a one-time (but no longer) paying user of evernote - WTF am I paying for monthly if not to support a dev team?

Seriously - I get that there are infra costs for some of the services, and I wouldn't mind paying those costs plus a reasonable upcharge, but I'm sure as fuck not going to pay a company $100+ a year subscription to store under a GB of data.

So now I host bookstack and I pay backblaze ~$0.22/m to back up all my notes, which is much closer to real costs for these services if they're not under development.

[tombert]

Genuine question, why not use a free Git service or something

I pay for Sourcehut now, but until recently I was using a free private GitHub account to sync my notes in Obsidian. It works fine and cost me nothing (at least nominally).

[horsawlarway]

The honest answer is because I backup a large number of other things to backblaze anyways.

I went on a mission about 5 years ago to essentially stop paying for SaaS services if there was an opensource alternative available that I could self host.

I have old machines lying around anyways since I was upgrading about every 5 years for gaming. So I have a 5 node k8s cluster in my basement serving about 20 different services that I use, and I no longer pay for basically any subscription software.

Git is fine for text content, (hell, I have about 25 personal repos on github anyways, although speaking of... most are mirrored to a local gitea instance) but it's not a great solution for backing up DBs, binary data, media, photos, etc...

Eventually - I'll likely replace backblaze with a NAS at a family member's house, but for now - it's very cheap and the billing is fair (usage based billing, not the exorbitant monthly fees most SaaS services charge).

---

Plus - I really like the flexibility of web based services. I don't have to remember to sync anything with bookstack, I just hit 'https://bookstack.[mydomain]' in a browser from any machine I want - Friends house? works. Public library? works. Wife's phone? works. Work laptop? works. etc... you get the idea.

Even after accounting for the initial outlay for a large NAS and my extra power consumption - I broke even in just under 3 years self hosting. Turns out SaaS is sorta a scam if you're technically capable.

And absolutely more power to ya for finding your own alternative solution!

[tombert]

Totally fair.

I've heard that Mercurial has competent binary diffing, so I might at some point try using that to sync my Obsidian stuff.

Anyway, it's not like 22 cents a month is going to bankrupt you so I am certainly not criticizing, I was just curious.

[tootie]

Corporate raiders is a bit of a different concept. That implies a hostile takeover. Like aggressively buying up shares in order acquire a majority stake and set company policy against the wishes of other insiders.

Bending Spoons is what we'd call vulture capitalists which have and continue to exist. Basically they buy weakening businesses and carve them up for parts, selling anything of value and squeezing max revenue of whatever is left.

[Aunche]

> Basically they buy weakening businesses and carve them up for parts, selling anything of value and squeezing max revenue of whatever is left.

People say this like it's a bad thing, but without "vulture capitalists", struggling companies would default and banks would attempt to do the same, except they are much worse at it and even more people would lose their jobs.