Pretty much every time Verizon wanders outside of its core competencies (operating telecom networks, lobbying to hamstring competition, undermining the most basic of regulatory oversight)…
Verizon Fails Again, Shutters Attempted Zoom Alternative BlueJeans After Paying $400 Million For It::Pretty much every time Verizon wanders outside of its core competencies (operating telecom networks, lobbying to hamstring competition, undermining the most basic of regulatory oversight), the telco amusingly falls flat on its face. It's quite honestly starting to get a little weird. Whether it’s the company’s Go90 video streaming platform, its video joint venture with RedBox, its news website Sugarstring (which…
It was a stupid name and a terrible service. Unsurprised to learn that Verizon was sitting on it just enshittifying it and waiting for it to make money without doing a damn thing with it. I hate this timeline.
Imagine being able to just waste $400 mil. While 40% of the people in the same, richest country on Earth are living paycheck to paycheck, trying not to become homeless.
Verizon has 117,100 employees. They spent $3415 per person. This doesn't include all the contractors and consultants they have manning their phone lines overseas for a few bucks a day.
Their market cap is 140.25 billion dollars. 0.4 billion is a trivial amount of money compared to all the money already invested in them. Purchasing a company for less than 1% of your valuation to try and make more money seems like an incredibly safe experiment.
One person thinks about big numbers as "why can't they just give it away so I can have things better." There's four billion people out there who have trouble putting food on the table and could never even think about seeing a quality of life that even the homeless have in the US. Dividing that 400 million up wouldn't do much of anything for them.
Even if you take 40% of americans (132,760,000) and hand out 400 million dollars that's only $3 per person.
We used BlueJeans at the startup I worked for starting in 2014. At some point a few years in, we switched to Zoom. I distinctly remember BlueJeans absolutely tearing through my laptop’s battery and the fan going into full hover mode. I was so glad to be rid of that thing.