Bending Spoons has filed to go public in the US after a rapid acquisition spree that turned it into the owner of a strange bundle of aging or maturing internet products, including AOL, Vimeo, Meetup, Eventbrite, Evernote, WeTransfer, and Komoot. Reuters highlighted the basic financial pitch: much higher revenue than a year ago, a swing to profit, and a lot of recurring subscription income. People reading it did not treat this like a normal software growth story. They treated it like a roll-up. The company buys products that have plateaued, cuts hard, raises prices, and tries to harvest subscriptions longer than the original operators could.
That framing dominated because many had seen the same movie before with
CA, Oracle, or more recently Broadcom and
VMware. The point was not that acquisitions are bad. It was that some buyers specialize in products whose users are sticky, migration is politically painful, and the easiest financial upside comes from cost cuts and renewed leverage over trapped customers. Several people said this does not require the acquired product to improve for users. It only requires the remaining customer base to stay long enough.
The strongest practical thread was that lock-in is often weaker than executives assume. One
CIO described moving companies off Salesforce,
EMR systems, and other entrenched enterprise software with much less disruption than leadership feared. In that view, the real moat around many acquired products is organizational inertia, board politics, and resume-driven prestige buying. That matters here because the durability of Bending Spoons' model depends on customers behaving as if switching is impossible.
Users of specific consumer products mostly expected
enshittification rather than rescue. Komoot, Meetup, Evernote, and Filmic were the recurring examples. People cited login walls, price increases, cluttered interfaces, and broad skepticism that a company can fire most of a product team and still deliver meaningful product improvement. A few pushed back that some assets were already deteriorating before being acquired, that Vimeo appears better run post-deal, and that for a near-dead app, a ruthless operator can be the difference between shutdown and survival. Even those defenses were narrow. The overall read was that Bending Spoons may be a competent financial machine, but most people would rather not be one of its customers, employees, or vendors.