[k310]

IMO, they buy companies, lay off en masse and sell the now sunsetted products.

Reminiscent of "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, but he gutted and then flipped whole companies.

I think of them as the bakery outlet store that sells only stale goods.

[w4der]

They also have a very intense workplace culture, I had a manager who was part of Evernote while their site was being laid off by Bending Spoons, and he heard some wild stories, they pay above average for a European tech company (but with geo-fenced brackets), crunch a ton and then crash out at a big new year's party were they fly all their teams to some resort, among other things.

[ElProlactin]

New Year's party with your coworkers at a resort sounds like hell. Or a script for a Jonah Hill movie.

[orsorna]

Wow sounds very family friendly!

[cucumber3732842]

So?

Doesn't sound any worse than the average restaurant.

[marcosdumay]

How many people work in your family? How many different events in random parts of the world can your family attend together at mid-night December 31st?

[epolanski]

Warren Buffett used to do the same for decades, in fact this is how he came to control Berkshire Hathaway which he calls his worst investment, as it wasn't rational and merely driven by ego.

He wanted to take a controlling share of the company and then sell it for pieces so he started to buy increasing stakes in it.

When Berkshire management understood Buffett's plan they decided to stop him to not let him cannibalize and kill the company, and they offered to buy back his shares for 11$ a share which he accepted as it would've been a 2x return on his investment in a very short time span.

But then they made the critical mistake of low balling him by 1$ per share when it came to sign the documents, and he got so much emotional that he went and bought the entire company to prove a point and fire the management.

It was not a good idea and he would not make money on that acquisition, so after selling off the assets he decided to make it the holding for its other investments.

[missedthecue]

Buffett wasn't liquidating textile mills. What would happen is that all the publicly traded New England textile companies themselves would close down unprofitable mill locations to stay alive and would use the resulting cash from liquidating the real estate to do a tender offer. Buffett simply bought the shares and waited for the next tender offer to happen.

When Buffett eventually did take control of the Berkshire, he poured tons of money into it to try to keep it alive, and eventually lost every dollar he invested. He didn't make the decision to shut down the last mill until 1985! That was 20 years after taking control. Throwing all that good money after bad to try keeping it afloat is why he called it a 'monumentally stupid decision'.

[frevib]

This guy dubbed it “get Komooted”, as they pulled the same trick for used-to-be-great cycling app Komoot: https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/

The app quality almost immediately went down the drain after the acquisition by Bending Spoons.

[insane_dreamer]

I don't like PE players like Bending Spoons, but I have used Komoot extensively for years, for cycling (and more recently hiking), and haven't seen any decrease in quality since the acquisition.

[doctorpangloss]

With LLMs, I feel like they'll have the last laugh.

[flaviolivolsi]

Yep. They fucked up Komoot so badly that I'm building my own cycling app

[alephnerd]

It's the circle of life - all businesses reach a point where they don't have significant growth potential or became a "keep the lights on" operation, and at that point their investors and founders wish to exit and cash out in order to invest in greener pastures.

That's where businesses like Bending Spoons, Red Ventures, and IAC come in for digital media.

[bayindirh]

They didn’t burn Evernote to the ground to my surprise, but I jumped ship the day they bought it.

It turned out that I have grown out of Evernote anyway, so no big loss.

[criddell]

I really liked Evernote but they raised the price too much for me.

I used it mostly as an archive for long term storage where I could find things easily and it was pleasant to use. When it was $36 / year it made sense for me. I probably only used it a dozen or two times every year so it cost me roughly $1 / session.

Then they quadrupled the price for me and paying $4 to dig out my TSA known traveler number was too much. I loaded it all into another application (Obsidian which is going downhill as well).

[kepano]

In what way is Obsidian going downhill?

[criddell]

Like Evernote, they keep adding more and more features and functionality to the core product. The original idea of it being a great notes application over a directory of markdown files (and attachments) was simple and brilliant.

I think they jumped the shark with the canvas feature. They had to add a non-markdown file to the directory system and signaled that they were okay moving on from the original idea. Obsidian has only gotten fatter since then.

Canvas and the other big changes are all interesting ideas, but they should be a separate product or products. IMHO, Obsidian should be recognized as complete and go into a maintenance mode where stability, security, and performance are the development goals.

I think they worry that if they slow down, their paying customers (of which I am one) will jump ship. For some of us, it's the opposite.

[kepano]

(context: I help make Obsidian)

Canvas can be disabled in Core Plugins, like most other features.

In general I mostly see the opposite criticism: that Obsidian out of the box is too barebones and that it requires plugins to be useful.

I tend to be more on your side though. I prefer Obsidian to be as streamlined as possible and hate bloat. Last year I asked the community "what should we remove from the app?" And I mostly got feature requests :(

https://x.com/kepano/status/1890957031017730335

It's a hard thing to balance, but what makes me hopeful that Obsidian won't become bloatware is:

1. We're only seven people, we don't have investors, and we plan to stay a small team so we don't have the same growth pressure that Evernote faced. We simply don't have that much bandwidth.

2. The file-over-app approach makes it easier to build opt-in interoperable tools like you describe. We've explicitly focused on shipping things like Obsidian API, URI, and CLI instead of building everything into the app (most other teams in our space seem busy stuffing a bunch of AI junk in their apps). One example is Obsidian Web Clipper, a separate tool we made that has matured into a great separate product.

3. Plugins (both core and community) mean you can make the app as streamlined as you want.

[bayindirh]

> Obsidian out of the box is too barebones and that it requires plugins to be useful.

From my perspective, it's absolutely not. I have a couple of vaults, and only one of them has one community plugin installed, and that's edit history. I'm pretty happy with what it provides out of the box.

I have a couple of friends who uses bigger/heavier plugins like media manager to basically transform Obsidian to other tools, but as a note taking tool and wiki/digital garden publishing platform, it does a great job out of the box.

I currently trust it to keep my most valuable notes, to be honest.

Please keep it up that way. I really feel sad when the tools I like go haywire and I'm forced to stop supporting the people behind that because I can't use the tool anymore.

Thanks for all the hard work.

[criddell]

I appreciate the response and am glad to hear that my less-is-more preference isn't dismissed.

It's been a while so I went through my plugins settings. About half of the core plugins are enabled and I've never enabled community plugins.

The responses to your post on x are pretty disheartening. So many zero-effort replies along with gems like "make it simple like Notion".

[bayindirh]

I'm wondering about this as well. I don't see a decline either. I use their Sync and Publish services as well.

[aquariusDue]

Hi! Not the OP but I've used Obsidian since before 2020 till about 2022 when I switched to org-mode and Emacs.

I like the new Obsidian features like the CLI a lot but I still feel Obsidian inherently is incredibly similar to org-mode and Emacs (guess that's why I was drawn to both) in the sense that both work with local data and file formats that usually can be opened in any text editor but both of them bolt so much stuff on top that the files themselves (markdown or org) become incredibly coupled and hard to use by themselves.

Now of course in Obsidian's case you're not forced to install a lot of plugins that lead to this issue but I don't know a lot of people that have the diligence to keep their notes "light". Though if I remember from your blog post showcasing how you do note-taking you might qualify.

And then it's also the fact that you've got a powerful piece of kit and now you're not supposed to mold it to your needs and preferences and avoid driving it hard, instead you're forced to practice discipline. Sure, there's something to be said for that too but that's besides the point.

If I understood correctly Obsidian is readying for a plugin marketplace akin to the Unity Asset Store and I'm personally thinking this might drive you to monetize Obsidian harder even though you've shown throughout the years you're a great steward of it.

To get to the point finally I guess people are worried that because Obsidian itself is not open source at some point it might evolve in a way that becomes incompatible with most peoples' preferences and for me that's where something like org-mode and Emacs inch ahead because it's FOSS.

That said thank you for Obsidian. It was my entry point towards clearer thinking and brought a semblance of structure when I needed it most. I don't use it anymore but I watch enthusiastically from the sidelines.

tl;dr the chance of a paid plugin marketplace might signal a shift in the community

[kepano]

> the chance of a paid plugin marketplace might signal a shift in the community

Where the heck are you getting this from? We are explicitly not doing this.

[aquariusDue]

My bad! I've mixed up some parts from this official blog post[0] and some talk in the community.

I thought the "What does it mean for a plugin to be Paid or have Optional Payments?" part from the FAQ was hinting towards the chance for people to sell plugins on https://community.obsidian.md/ and Obsidian itself would facilitate the transaction for a small cut at some point in the future.

I'm glad that's not the case and I apologize again for the confusion though I hope it's clear now why I believed this in the first place.

[0] https://obsidian.md/blog/future-of-plugins/

[konfusinomicon]

I guess somebody out there has gotta make the croutons