Verizon is shutting down the videoconferencing app it bought for $400M | Hacker News Reader

Verizon is shutting down the videoconferencing app it bought for $400M

theverge.com

32 pointsstock_toaster21 comments

Verizon baffles me with purchases like this. They have bought a lot of random companies like this and Yahoo with no real purpose, while effectively letting T-Mobile take the decisive lead on 5G. What were they thinking?

Seems like they operate like r/wallstreetbets which is if something is cheap, let's buy it as it can only go up, only to see later that it can go down further. A lot.

It just seems like spending that cash on oh, I don’t know 5G cell phone coverage would’ve been a much smarter investment long term, but I’m not a C-suite executive, so what do I know.

Verizon and ATT executives thought they could try and compete with Apple/Alphabet/Microsoft/Amazon/Meta.

Being a dumb pipe has less profit potential than being a multimedia utility ad delivery platform business.

The dumb pipes are scared that they’ll be commoditized into irrelevance, and they’re right. So they randomly buy things they hope will keep them afloat.

Verizon screwed themselves by not participating seriously in any of the spectrum auctions prior to the big chunk of C-Band they bought which they are in the process of rolling out. AT&T now covers more land area than any other carrier, and T-Mobile is way ahead of them in terms of mid-band 5G deployment. Verizon bet on mmWave 5G which is nice, but doesn't travel and is only really useful in big metros and stadiums. Their mid-band (C-Band) which they bought ~200mhz on average for most areas is in the process of being deployed, but it doesn't travel as far as they expected, so it's going to take quite a bit of time deploying more cell sites (whether towers or buildings) to densify their network.

All of this is happening while they continue to hope their customers just put up with their congested wireless network by trying to ride of their old reputation of being the "best" while they jack up their plan prices for a network that is getting worse.

Damn, their strategy of relying on the inertia of their reputation is working just fine, I just switched to them from fine-but-not-spectacular AT&T when I needed to add on a couple new phone lines. The price was about the same, and so far to me network performance seems better, but probably a lot of that is just placebo effect.

Is t-mobile actually usable now? I’ve tried them 2-3 times over the last decade and urban performance was generally acceptable (though even then with weird dead zones that made it tough to use) but it would always quickly fall over any time I was beyond suburban areas.

No switched to t mobile recently and it absolutely sucks. Miss calls constantly, drop calls, texts wont send etc

I had the worst customer service experience with T-Mobile than I've ever had with any company.

There's literally nothing that could get me to go back to T-Mobile.

Plus t-mobile getting hacked is so common it would be more newsworthy if they managed to go a year without it happening.

Verizon is remarkably good at this.

Under the stewardship of Yahoo and Verizon, Tumblr has lost a whopping 99.8 percent of its value: https://www.extremetech.com/internet/296569-verizon-sells-tu...

A company I used to work for adopted BlueJeans for conference calls and videoconferencing prior to the pandemic. I never used it because I thought the name was incredibly dumb. I just continued to use my ancient 800 number and PIN code for conference calls.

Then I, like everyone else in the world during the pandemic, got Shanghai’d into Team Zoom or Team Teams, depending on who was leading the meeting. Goodnight sweet BlueJeans, I never knew ye.

Blue jeans always felt very “educational market” anytime we used it - it worked well enough but Zoom far outclassed it by being more modern/expected, and Teams outclassed it by being boringly available.

I used BlueJenes briefly on a paid account, it was better implemented than Zoom. The issue I ran into was people didn't want to install the BlueJeans client because they already had Zoom.

as someone from a company that used to use bluejeans, in no way would I say it was better than zoom or even teams. thank god we stopped using it

How to destroy your competitor: Buy it, then shut it down.

Verizon doesn't even compete in the conferencing market.

They do(conference calls), but that is a stretch, until you raised the point I too would have not lumped traditional conference calls with internet based conference systems.

They could never even convince people internally to migrate from Webex and Meet, so this is not surprising.

Holy crap I forgot all about them, especially during the pandemic. Now it all makes sense.

Verizon caught itself a good dose of Yahoo, I see.

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