Its great that Microsoft has teams- but nothing to do with skype as a consumer front-facing product.
Years ago, Skype was the de-facto solution for video calls and video meetings. There was no zoom, there was no google meet. Skype was so known for video chat that it was a verb. 'Skype me'
Skype absolutely and completely fell asleep at the wheel and wholesale abandoned the public market to Zoom, Discord and Google. Its not like it happened overnight either. Skype had the ability to respond to these guys but instead did almost nothing after a redesign to 'skype 8' in 2018.
I cant exclaim how astronomical a failure it is to go from being the defacto verb for video calls and instant messaging to not even having 5% of the end-user consumer market anymore. It would be like if people stopped using google for search, or youtube for videos. You dont get to say "Yeah well google got reworked into gsuite which has 300m users" - Its still a failure of biblical proportions.
They should have been capable of creating a enterprise product and keeping their consumer offering going.
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Just to be clear, I understand teams is large and doing well. Its also a enterprise product and it has nothing to do with what im talking about above. Discord (~20b valuation) only exists because Skype did zero updates or innovation for years.
How much they paid for Mint vs CK has little bearing. Google bought youtube for 1.6b and Motorola for 12b (later sold for 3b) - Which would you rather focus on today?
I dont disagree Mints revenue is not enough currently, but thats the issue. Mint has 3.6 million MAU. Maybe I need to be more explicit, but the value of a financial services user is high, not just in immediate revenue but also in referred revenue. Mint has never done a good job at pricing their product. Ive used it for 15 years and have never paid them a dollar. Thats a failure on their part, as I would have gladly paid monthly or yearly for the past 15 years. Even if I didnt, there were tons of products I would have IAP'd for that could have been seamlessly integrated into mint. Instead they seem entirely focused on trying to get me to sign up for credit cards or to switch bank accounts. What a lost opportunity.
As for the how much it costs to operate mint, thats true we dont know exactly what it is. But I am not a ostrich with my head in the sand. I can infer that the cost is going to be magnitudes less than the revenue it brings in, even in its current sad state. This isnt a chatgpt startup thats using insane resources on metal or developers to offer a product. Its a application suite that processes and coorelates data provided by plaid.com - Mint doesnt even do any of the heavy lifting anymore.
The fact that this is being shut down vs being sold or at least integrated deeply in credit karma speaks so poorly for the intuit management I am not even sure what to say. The app has to be capable of generating millions a month in revenue at the least. Who is on the leadership team for mint, so I know to never work or partner with them in the future? This is so insanely incompetent its just.. shocking.
This is a fumble not seen since skype fell asleep and did nothing during 2021 while google and zoom came and took their entire market.
At the very least, make the app paid only. If you are worried about upsetting me because I have to pay for something that used to be free, trust me- Im going to be way more pissed about not being able to use it at all.
I dont know, this whole thing just rubs me the wrong way. Intuit is a public company that should be focused on maximizing revenue. Destroying a app thats worth 500m-1b on the private market seems like its worthy of a shareholder lawsuit.
I dont say this out of spite or trolling. I say this as a user of mint since they launched in 2007. Ive been with this app, letting them ravage and sell my data for over 15 years. https://i.imgur.com/XlioSth.png . My old startup even participated in the same crunchies award as mint did, when we both won (us for bootstrapped startup and mint for
founder of the year) so I am nostalgic about them being put out to pasture for no reason.
I actually spoke with one of the people at HN and suggested they implement a feature which lets you disassociate a post or comment from the author. I think this is very similar to how reddit handles it when you delete an account. All the posts/comments stay in place, but the author name of each item changes from "Bobsmith33" to "deleted user" - Seems like a great compromise for HN. Good (and bad) content remains, but the association factor is removed.
We did, Im just not sure how to show our support for the EFF without it being misconstrued. A tiny link in the footer does very little to drive traffic to the EFF, which was the goal of the prominent position. Without donations EFF doesnt exist and thats bad news for all privacy startups.
No, we just believe in the mission of privacy and they seem like the biggest supporters in the business. They paved the road we now walk upon, so its due to give them something back.
*edit- Seeing comments below, I can see the issues. We will remove the 'Support the EFF' banner for now until we can do it in a better manner.
Hey HN- Im one of the team members at redact. Redact is a cross platform electron app which allows you to delete content programmatically from most of the big sites out there (we are adding more every day). Meaning, you could say something like "Delete all posts I made on instagram with less than 15 likes in 2019" or (very soon) "Delete all my tweets that are political"
We have been working on this for a little over a year. As you can imagine, working with some of these legacy services is less than ideal. (looking at you skype)
When we launched, we were aware of tons of other free services that let you delete content, but we found that most of them were either unmaintained and broken, not feature rich enough or complicated for grandmas to install. "Ok, so first- download Kali linux to a thumb drive. Then reboot into it and install python and clone this repo...."
Our goal with redact is to make privacy as accessible to the general public as possible. There are tons of services that let you delete 'public' data about you (for instance, deleting your whitepages.com page) but we found very few which took care of content YOU created across more than 1 service.
Years ago, Skype was the de-facto solution for video calls and video meetings. There was no zoom, there was no google meet. Skype was so known for video chat that it was a verb. 'Skype me'
Skype absolutely and completely fell asleep at the wheel and wholesale abandoned the public market to Zoom, Discord and Google. Its not like it happened overnight either. Skype had the ability to respond to these guys but instead did almost nothing after a redesign to 'skype 8' in 2018.
I cant exclaim how astronomical a failure it is to go from being the defacto verb for video calls and instant messaging to not even having 5% of the end-user consumer market anymore. It would be like if people stopped using google for search, or youtube for videos. You dont get to say "Yeah well google got reworked into gsuite which has 300m users" - Its still a failure of biblical proportions.
They should have been capable of creating a enterprise product and keeping their consumer offering going.
--
Just to be clear, I understand teams is large and doing well. Its also a enterprise product and it has nothing to do with what im talking about above. Discord (~20b valuation) only exists because Skype did zero updates or innovation for years.