I’ve got the fear - BS and their last acquisition

[WilliamL 667]

Not sure how many are aware of this info - 

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/3/23986187/filmic-staff-laid-off-bending-spoons

Up to know I’ve been kinda hoping Bending Spoons have good motives for app communities but I gotta say this as probably ended that. None of us like seeing staff laid off, I think we all accept that is inevitable with acquisition. What isn’t acceptable is laying off staff when it’s not the right time - ie Evernote’s now non existent support or in the case of filmic laying off staff vital to positive community eleements

Filmic even announced FilmicFest 2023, its annual competitive mobile filmmaking festival, would return this year with a $25,000 grand prize, but that’s presumably canceled since the event signup page no longer exists.

This bit to me stuck out - a great community element benched because of what exactly? This to me confirms the experience of the user isn’t a priority, much as we are seeing with Evernote and customer care.  This has left me really sad in a sense because I’m not sure now the app is in good hands, certainly not for the user base and the community that surrounds that.

 

 

[gazumped 12,076]

? Wasn't aware of this,  but isn't this exactly what they just did with Evernote?  Filmic is/ was Seattle based,  so it probably made a great deal of economic sense to move everything to Europe,  and 'Spoons whole product base is visual effects so they presumably think they have the local expertise to handle it.  As for it not being acceptable to lay off staff when it's "not the right time" - while they clearly dropped the ball with Evernote Support we don't have enough information to say anything here.

And worrying about whether the app is in good hands would rule out using most things on the market. (Looking at you Adobe/ Google/ MS...)

I leave the business and the politics to them and just want an app that suits my needs...

[PinkElephant 8,838]

At least it seems they have some practice in the way they run their business - for good or bad, time will tell.

[WilliamL 667]

18 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Wasn't aware of this,  but isn't this exactly what they just did with Evernote? 

That’s a fair point, and to a degree yeah, I think for me the filmic is further down the line, a bit more of what will be. What stood out for me is kinda what concerns me here - the positive community engagements filmic had with its user community - they are gone, bending spoons doesn’t seem to see user experience and enjoyment as a priority. I think this might explain why they were happy to let the customer support team be released without anything in its place, again, user experience is not the priority. That is a concern for me, I want my use of an app to be positive and to share that with others who have a similar experience.

[gazumped 12,076]

We don't know what BS plans to do about the filmic community.  User experience and enjoyment certainly seems to have been a major concern for Evernote's new staff - hence the focus on speed and reliability,  plus RTE and AI.

We also don't know exactly what happened with the old support team,  but I'd bet that a company the size of 'Spoons (400+ staff) has a pretty good support structure.  They also (says Bing AI) won prizes for being amongst the best places to work in Europe which tends to foster being nice to customers.  By all accounts the staff in the US that got laid off had some pretty nice deals too. 

It's sad that folks got laid off,  but I can see that having teams in different countries is neither efficient nor cheap.  It was possibly dumb of the new team not to predict that there would be a flood of contacts after the takeover (and the occasional flubs) - but again they may have been a little misled by the old team papering over some cracks to get the best deal for the company.

Like I said:  my only concern is - is my app working?