[danabrams]

There are four stages to any successful companies lifecycle and Bending Spoons's model is to maximize what they can get in the final stage of decline.

There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're a user of one of these services you might take it as a hint to find an alternative.

[alexpotato]

> There are four stages to any successful companies lifecycle

I usually say in interviews that my preferred time to join a company is at the end of stage 1 (start up) and the start of phase 2 (organizing).

Nothing makes me happier than to be told "Hey, we got this up and running and it's a mess. Now we need someone to turn this into a system that is easy to modify and maintain."

[pigeons]

Yeah, gotta call out the "There's nothing wrong with that".

[lovich]

Can a business not just reach a steady state after maximizing its market?

[hollerith]

It makes no economic sense for AOL to stay in a steady state after having been thoroughly disrupted by newer products.

[NuclearPM]

“ There's nothing wrong with that”

Debatable

[The-Bus]

There's skill in being able to manage a declining or non-growth business in a way that still pleases your consumer base (and therefore reduces your attrition rate). Not everyone does it well.

[NuclearPM]

What you said is not synonymous with “maximize what they can get in the final stage of decline.”.

[JumpCrisscross]

There's nothing wrong with it per se. Plenty of great products were ruined because management refused to accept that it wasn't in a growth market anymore and should be run for minimising customer losses, not gaining substantial new ones. That, in turn, means laying off a lot of the design, engineering and sales talent that was necessary for the previous configuration.

You can also be a bastard and jack up prices while cutting e.g. customer service. (Though absent new major revisions, service costs should go down.) But I'd argue we need, in tech, more of this strategy of calm wind-down than the everything-must-be-growth mindset.

[cess11]

Is this practice good for the workers in the organisation?

[mavelikara]

Definitely, no.