If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it

A very analytical, technological, short-sighted view of things. But not necessarily how the customers think.

For many customers, a company that isn't growing is shrinking. If a company isn't willing to invest in growth, that's a red flag.

I mentioned the Vimeo thing in a meeting this morning, and the head of Communications immediately said he's going to start looking for alternatives.

You can make all the analogies and excuses you like, but look at Vimeo's sister properties (Evernote, etc.) Are they better off since they were gutted? Are they delivering more value to the customers, or just funneling money to the parent company and its investors?

I think a better analogy is some big Wall Street investment company buying up nursing homes, and making lots of noises about "efficiency." That never works out well for the patients/customers. Only for the company.

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Nextgrid 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> the head of Communications immediately said he's going to start looking for alternatives.

He's gonna start looking for alternatives and then most likely find nothing that matches the featureset vs price of the current solution + the cost of switching, and the matter will quickly disappear.

Last time AWS or Cloudflare was down a lot of noise was made and a lot of people started looking for alternatives too - and everyone forgot about it a week later.

> Only for the company.

Yes, the point of business is to make profit, not to be a charity. Bending Spoons believes they can extract enough profit off Vimeo to justify the purchase price, either by reducing expenses, raising prices or both. This may still be palatable to the customers if they don't have any better option.

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reaperducer an hour ago | parent [-]

Yes, the point of business is to make profit, not to be a charity.

No one said it was. Where do you see that in this thread?

Bending Spoons believes they can extract enough profit off Vimeo to justify the purchase price, either by reducing expenses, raising prices or both. This may still be palatable to the customers if they don't have any better option.

Just listen to yourself. "Extract enough profit," "raising prices," and ending with You don't like it, too bad. You sound like the taxi industry before Uber.

This the type of thinking that gave us Windows 11, Adobe, and every other piece of technology that started good, but became crap.

It's also the reason new companies suddenly show up and eat the incumbent's lunch. Happens every day.

I'm glad I don't work for you or your company. I have pride in my work. I wouldn't want to be just another tool to "extract" things from my customers because "they don't have any better option."

	▲	Nextgrid an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> No one said it was. Fair enough, a minority of businesses are run as public benefit corporations. But the vast majority is ran to generate profit. Bending Spoons especially. > I wouldn't want to be just another tool to "extract" things from my customers I assume you're independently wealthy and acquired said wealth from a generous donor who gave it to you with no expectations in return? Because otherwise we're all "extracting" something. I take pride in my work too and I believe the prices I charge for my services are fair - but nevertheless if I gave the choice to my clients between paying me for those services or getting them for free, they'd prefer free. > This the type of thinking that gave us Windows 11 What's giving us enshittification and the terrible quality of software nowadays is the lack of healthy competition, because of lacking anti-trust enforcement and adversarial interoperability being effectively illegal. Companies thus take their customers hostage and raise prices/decrease quality. Ideally we'd just make competition in tech a reality again which would put a limit on enshittification.

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listenallyall 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'd question why your "head of Communications" isn't already aware of alternative vendors for important pieces of their domain. After all, companies go out of business, get bought out, change pricing all the time. And Vimeo was bought out months ago - this person didn't start researching then, just in case? I'd suggest the CEO start "looking for alternatives" for this employee.

	▲	reaperducer an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'd question why your "head of Communications" isn't already aware of alternative vendors for important pieces of their domain. I don't like the guy, so it's not like me to defend him, but perhaps because he's busy being the head of the Communications department, instead of a tech nerd? My company produces thousands of pieces of communication each year in many different forms. Video is a small part of what his department does, so you make the false assumption that this is an "important piece" of his domain. I wouldn't be surprised to learn he doesn't have some internal cronjob to constantly search for alternatives to every single one of the (probably hundreds) of vendors we have around the world. It's very weird that you feel that you're in a position to second-guess a person you never met, in a job you've never done, in a company you don't know, in an industry you also don't know. That's Olympic-level hubris.