They bought Komoot, laid off 80% of the staff, but they still did a major redesign of the app and website afterwards. I expected outages, but so far it works like before.
They bought Komoot, laid off 80% of the staff, but they still did a major redesign of the app and website afterwards. I expected outages, but so far it works like before.
> They bought Komoot, laid off 80% of the staff, but they still did a major redesign
This sounds like "doing a major redesign" would be something positive. I'm a paying customer since ages and use the app on daily basis. The new design adds nothing except confusion, at the same time they broke the app on my smartwatch. I'm pretty much thinking about switching apps because I don't see myself buying a new watch just because of this.
Some companies would be better off with less bored designers. This is exactly the same situation like a couple of years ago, when Spotify every week rearranged the GUI and every week I had to relearn how I can reach the same functionality. Back then I had to use the App Store to give feedback, but I see now I can do the same directly in the Komoot app. They're gonna have something to laugh about...
>Some companies would be better off with less bored designers.
The comment you are replying to says they laid off 80% of them!
They laid off the original staff.
Bending Spoons has own teams taking care of the acquired companies. I read about it here a while ago. I am pretty sure the re-design was done by one of those teams. It's pretty close to the new design of MeetUp. I am talking about those ppl.
This might just be an accounting trick.
A lot of mature products act as a lottery ticket printing machine for the rest of the company - spend the cash on some other concept and hope that new thing becomes a stand alone product on its own.
Now that komoot is owned by a parent company, instead of printing lottery tickets that other employees are scratching off, the cash is being sent up to the parent company, who may just have employees in another entity being funded by the money from komoot.
It was mostly a cosmetic redesign, no functionality has been significantly changed. Websites don't just stop working after people are fired immediately, but they slowly die or become home for parasites. Twitter is a great example of this.
Except that it now has ten times the number of reminders popping up to please subscribe for premium, even though I already have the world maps package, so they got some of my money already.