> 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.

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t1234s 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"corporate raiders" are a definitely real thing.

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everfrustrated 6 hours ago | parent [-]

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

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munk-a 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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everfrustrated 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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johnnyanmac 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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kelnos 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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horsawlarway 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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).

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thatguy0900 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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tootie 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> 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.