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i thought they used money to do that
Late 90s movie reference buys early 90s rotting corpse.
This headline reads like a very surreal self help book title.
There is no spoon.
Enshittification company buys the O.G. enshittification
This fucking company keeps buying things I use and ruining them. I can’t believe I know their name
At least I don’t use AOL
Can you explain more what and how they ruined something for you? So far I haven’t heard of any real negative change to the applications themselves.
Splice, impossibly expensive subscription even though I paid for a lifetime license (theft)
Focos, maybe they sold it, but they crippled the one thing I used and changed it to a subscription
Evernote, so long ago, I don’t remember, but expensive
Komoot, soon to be too expensive and enshittified
It’s just really weird I keep running into them with random apps I have used
Thanks. Yeah, increasing revenue generation by increasing monetization is definitely part of their MO.
The other criticism I’ve seen levelled against them is that they fire almost everyone who works at a company they acquire to run it bare bones.
Can someone plausibly explain the Bending Spoons business model?
Big chunk of debt financing for decrepit brands with old tech. Other than strip-mining user data, I can’t figure it out.
Buy a company which already has a vast historical user base and a well known brand for fuckall because it’s dieing, then make it good again and sell it off for more than fuckall.
They, as far as I’m aware, are not reselling like private equity would. They actually take over operations and get ROI through profits.
The idea here is to rebrand and modernize AOL as a gmail and cyber security alternative with decoupled infrastructure from US dependencies: A highly political topic in the EU currently.
What should we call our service so people are clear it’s free of American influence… Hmmm ‘America On Line’
Europe On Line? EOL? End of line.
EOL? Y’all are going with an End Of Life service? Bold move cotton.
I believe Europe Online was a service about the time when AOL was a thing
Doesn’t ring a bell… not to say it didn’t exist, but it probably wasn’t very large at the time.
It was dial-up service and web site. It wasn’t very big, but i think it was around for some time. This is the best i could find: https://variety.com/1995/digital/features/europe-online-gets-at-amp-t-dialtone-99124960/
Interesting, thanks for digging that up. Looks like it didn’t pan out. At least in France, they arrived just as the local market was building itself, and it seems they didn’t manage to get a foot in the door. Maybe they got more lucky in other markets.
Doesn’t mean they will keep the name for EU customers. The value there is in the IP and the infrastructure configuration.
Thus the term: Rebrand.
I thought this was going to be a weird ass figure of speech.
There is no spoon.
