[rpdillon]

And the article tries to spin this positively:

> After the acquisition, Bending Spoons is anything but a passive owner, making changes to the products’ user experience and features, as well as to the underlying tech; monetization strategy, including pricing; and team organization, including headcount.

> While this focus on efficiency and revenue overlaps with private equity strategies, Bending Spoons claims a key difference: It “aims to hold forever, and has never sold an acquired business.” It is building a live portfolio, not presiding over a tech graveyard.

That last line has me wondering who wrote this.

[IncreasePosts]

Renowned author C. H. Atgpt

[everybodyknows]

> building a live portfolio

The portfolio grows -- "live", and faster than each of the businesses within it shrink. As they all do, by Bending Spoons' strategic design.

[Grombobulous]

I don’t feel like the article was sortballing the company. They brought up things like the WeTransfer founder criticizing Bending Spoons’ decisions.

As for my opinion on the company, I don’t really see anything particularly negative about it. I think the fact that they’ve never sold an acquired business is a rather admirable trait.

In a way, they’re doing something that may not have been possible without this style of intervention, which is to keep companies/products that would have otherwise disappeared viable.

For a company like Evernote it wouldn’t be better for their customers if the company liquidated. There are worse things that can happen to your service provider of choice than price increases or worse customer support.

[rpdillon]

People are framing this like they're creating sustainable businesses, but if you look into the details, what they're consistently doing is stagnating on any kind of feature development, making the apps and sites more difficult to use and have more nags, and they're increasing prices, sometimes by 10x or 100x. When I look for a company that I think I would admire, I'm looking for customers that are satisfied and recommend the product to their friends.

Charging $20,000 for a note-taking app subscription is not that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48849810

[puszczyk]

I don't know about their other software, but i'm a (paying) user of komoot. Komoot development has stagnated until bending spoons took over ~1y ago, see the recent https://www.komoot.com/product-updates

maybe it's case by case basis; i'm not an evernote user since the botched rewrite probably 10y ago at this point

[Grombobulous]

I certainly don’t find any of that positive, either, but sometimes what a lot of these companies need to survive is to increase prices and only worry about the feelings of the customers who find those higher prices to be worth it.

The $20,000 price plan wasn’t a real price, that was just a not so gentle nudge to move to a different offering. Maybe it feels bad but that plan effectively doesn’t exist anymore. Things change.

It’s got fewer features for the dollar, but if the previous company was not sustainable in the first place, it is what it is.

A company raising prices or cutting service quality is only a problem if they’re in a monopoly situation with no other market alternatives. None of the companies Bending Spoons has acquired are in that position. Many of them are far from being the market leaders.

The point is that Bending Spoons isn’t buying companies and saddling them with unsustainable debt like they’re Toys R Us. They’re buying companies that need drastic operating change and implementing that change so that they can exist in perpetuity.

[rpdillon]

> Things change.

This is true, but there are choices you can make in life to really minimize the impact. I've been using TiddlyWiki for more than 20 years and it always Just Works. I picked it precisely because I value endurance in the software I choose. I know that's not a fad right now, but folks just don't have to subject themselves to this standard of treatment.

That aside, my objection is the use of shady tactics to achieve that goal (constant nags and popups, massive price increases for reduced service, rejection of previously "lifetime" memberships, etc.), at the expense of the customer. Swaddling that in a blanket of "it's sustainable" makes me feel only a tiny bit better about it. To make an extreme comparison: fraud is also sustainable; I guess I'm saying sustainability is not an inherent good. If (hypothetically) every Evernote customer would be better off if they were using Joplin, keeping Evernote around would be a bug, not a feature. I don't think this is actually true, might it might be close.

[Grombobulous]

I think that every time an option leaves a market it’s a detriment to competition. It doesn’t really matter if that option was bad or that I won’t personally choose it.

I’m certainly very much against lifetime subscriptions losing promised features and things like that.

[Grombobulous]

I will add to my original reply, if I drink their company kool aid on their company website they pretty specifically list out a number of improvements they’ve made to their product portfolio.

They have claims like making Evernote sync faster, fixing stuck transfers on WeTransfer, offering a free organizer EventBrite account for the first time since 2005. These seem like pretty tangible claims.

Perhaps they are trying to combat this exact negative image that they’re just there to suck out value.

Maybe they’re lying about their accomplishments, I really don’t know. I don’t use any of their products.

[rpdillon]

Talking to real users tells a different story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847994

[Grombobulous]

Sure, one user’s anecdote. You can find negative reviews for any product.

Evernote on iOS currently has a 4.4 star rating.

For comparison, the Obsidian iOS app has a 4.5 star rating.

[rpdillon]

Yep, I ended up looking into this quite a bit more, and now agree with you. Evernote ratings were historically lower before the Bending Spoons acquisition. There are shady things you can do with ratings like ask whether they like they app before redirecting them to the rate it, it does seem like I was over-indexing on some anecdotes (I also worked with some ex-Evernoters, so I was coming in a bit biased). Thanks for pointing out the trend!