They had a huge first mover advantage, brand recognition, a cornered market and they leveraged none of that to make better products. Instead they squeezed every bit of value from the company, cashed out as profits, and with out any evolution in their products, competition moved in. Now they are selling what’s left to move out west to pan for that AI tech gold.
Sometimes corps go private at some point after an IPO when PE buys them up. Lots of companies have been driven into the ground that way, because all PE cares about is extracting maximum capital from the entity in the shortest span of time, which naturally ends up being a “squeezing blood from a stone” dynamic, and usually kills the corp. But this is known and accepted by the PE firms because they do not give a shit about the company. Only the capital they can extract from it.
They had a huge first mover advantage, brand recognition, a cornered market and they leveraged none of that to make better products. Instead they squeezed every bit of value from the company, cashed out as profits, and with out any evolution in their products, competition moved in. Now they are selling what’s left to move out west to pan for that AI tech gold.
I mean, are they VC or PE owned, primarily? Because that really does smack of VC or PE idiocy.
I thought they had a very mild IPO 10 ish years ago.
Sometimes corps go private at some point after an IPO when PE buys them up. Lots of companies have been driven into the ground that way, because all PE cares about is extracting maximum capital from the entity in the shortest span of time, which naturally ends up being a “squeezing blood from a stone” dynamic, and usually kills the corp. But this is known and accepted by the PE firms because they do not give a shit about the company. Only the capital they can extract from it.