Verizon Is Shutting Down BlueJeans, a Videoconferencing App It Bought For $400 Million (theverge.com) 27
Verizon's BlueJeans videoconferencing app will be shutting down just over three years after the company bought it for $400 million. 9to5Google reports: In May 2020, Verizon acquired BlueJeans, a business-focused video app that first launched in 2011. At the beginning of 2022, Google and Verizon partnered to preload the BlueJeans app on (since-discontinued) Glass Enterprise Edition 2 smart glasses sold by Verizon. More recently, BlueJeans gained a free tier this year, opening the app to many more potential customers and competing with the free consumer-ready services of Google Meet and Zoom. Suffice it to say BlueJeans didn't take off in popularity.
Today, members of Verizon's BlueJeans service were sent an email explaining that the app is being "sunset." The first phase of that shutdown process is that the free trial and the free "BlueJeans Basic" tier will no longer be available as of August 31, 2023. While not stated in the email we've received, business customers of BlueJeans will likely be given a longer period to transition off of the platform. In April 2020, CNBC reported that Verizon was going to pay around $400 million for the company.
Today, members of Verizon's BlueJeans service were sent an email explaining that the app is being "sunset." The first phase of that shutdown process is that the free trial and the free "BlueJeans Basic" tier will no longer be available as of August 31, 2023. While not stated in the email we've received, business customers of BlueJeans will likely be given a longer period to transition off of the platform. In April 2020, CNBC reported that Verizon was going to pay around $400 million for the company.
That's OK (Score:4, Funny)
Verizon will just jack up prices, make their plan pricing even more confusing, cut support and telephone staff, and step up their fraudulent practices to steal more money from their subscribers. They only look at 400 megabucks that they get to keep as their own money. $400 million that they lose? That's just customers' money waiting to be taken.
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No loss. Bluejeans is crap anyway.
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And they won't cut at the seams the way you want them to.
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I'm just surprised the founders were able to con someone into paying them $400 million for that useless app.
Re:That's OK (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what you get when you fail to regulate markets properly.
There is no need for regulation. The market is self-correcting.
Verizon is run by idiots. You have to offer a free tier for a product that relies on network effects. The free tier gives you the end-user base to build from with premium services.
Yet they failed to offer a free tier for 3 years, and finally offered it in desperation after the product had already failed.
They lost $400M, which is far more than any regulator would fine them.
Re:That's OK (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that the market is not self-correcting. If it was, Verizon and Comcast would have gone bust years ago. The fact is, the market has slowly congealed into agreements between ISPs not to tread on each other's turf, so there's effectively zero competition. New companies that do try to compete, according to lawsuits that were filed, tend to have their wires cut by "mysterious" accidents.
No, as far as I can see, the market isn't self-correcting at all, and requires subtle legislation to ensure that there actually is genuine competition in the marketplace.
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Yep. The public will pay for this but not in price hikes, they'll write it off and the whole country will pay for this mistake.
Bad name (Score:1)
"Blue Jeans" is a horrible name for a business app. "Slacks" would be much better.
Verizon sure seems like to borg useless companies (Score:2)
yahoo and AOL - borged for 9 billion. Later sold for 5 billion.
Blue Jeans? (Score:2)
Never even heard of that video platform. Hard to believe anyone would buy a company like that for so much, but then Microsoft buys good companies all the time for billions and lets it all just with on the vine.
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It's funny, we got several free BlueJeans licenses along with our Verizon fleet plan. It was on par with WebEx which we pay a good chunk of change for.
We tried switching some of our users over to BlueJeans but they continued to use WebEx because that's what their customers wanted or needed to use.
From my testing, it seemed like a perfectly usable conferencing solution with decent enterprise features. But with Teams being free and most other people using WebEx and Zoom, it just never got traction.
Verizon (Score:1)
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Verizon is full of incompetent idiots (Score:4, Informative)
Verizon is full of incompetent idiots who don't even care about their customers or their partners. True story from 15 years ago: Verizon had the one of the early app stores, the "Get It Now", which allowed BREW apps to be installed on their (non-smart) phones. Developers had to pay about $30-40k in testing fees alone to get certified for the minimum number of devices Verizon wanted to even be considered for distribution. We did that in my former company and our multi-lingual email/webmail/rss client got approved. Now the system was such that you only provided Verizon with the binaries for each device, the actual installation was part of their Get It Now system, you had nothing to do with it. We were doing well for over a year, until Verizon upgraded their Get It Now system. With that they managed to bork the installation of our app in a way that if you installed it, your Get It Now app store would crash... permanently... We started getting angry calls from customers and we could obviously replicate the problem immediately and could see there was nothing we could do on the phone to fix it ourselves - even full software reset was not enough! We had reports that even Verizon stores did not know how to fix them (although in-warranty replacements were available). We were emailing our Verizon account manager kind of frantically since it caused serious harm to users and it was ongoing. He responded at first, but days were passing and we had no news of fixing the problem, new borking installations were still happening, On further pressing we stopped getting replies. Eventually, after a total of about 3 weeks our app was silently pulled from the store. They could not fix it somehow and just decided to push it under the rug and not mention it to anyone?
We lost a decent income stream with that, Verizon was by far the largest BREW carrier, the rest of our carriers (who did not bork installation), mostly in S. America, amounted for under 5% of our income. I guess shame on us for making a deal with the devil (Verizon), but this was before Android, Apple etc stores, so Get It Now was by far the most popular way to publish mobile apps in the US.
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Verizon is the kind of hellscape company we'd have to deal with for everything if there were no competition. Only competition forces them to make things that are cost effective and work well. If we still had only one national telecom carrier, this is how everything would work: high cost, terrible functionality, very limited innovation.
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True story from this month. I tried to cancel Disney+ and they can't do it online since the "tile" for that isn't being shown. I had to call 3 times to get it removed, and they ended up raising my phone rate $5 as part of this. How is that even possible? Even their "executive" team can't determine what my bill is or should be. No one knows anything and their systems are so archaic they can't even revert stuff they did by accident. And their web site is trash and often gets errors or 404 pages. In fact, thei
I'm a customer, but can not see this notice (Score:1)
Mystifying (Score:2)
For me, trying to understand these business articles is like trying to understand particle physics. I just don't get it. I can't conceive of why anyone would pay $400 mil for a "video conferencing platform" when there are already a half-dozen more or less identical video conferencing platforms out there. How much can it possibly cost to develop a platform like that, anyway? A half a mil?
It seems like the only thing Bluejeans had going for it is that they convinced a few big companies (such as Salesforce
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I can't conceive of why anyone would pay $400 mil for a "video conferencing platform" when there are already a half-dozen more or less identical video conferencing platforms out there. How much can it possibly cost to develop a platform like that, anyway? A half a mil?
There could be a number of reasons. One, as you mentioned, is the existing client base. Yes, Salesforce was probably the biggest name on the list, but the long tail was probably pretty viable as well. Similarly, they may have had contracts in place for datacenters and/or CDNs at prices better than Verizon could negotiate.
Another may have to do with patents or implementations. Spinning up a video conferencing platform is easy, spinning up a *good* video conferencing platform is significantly harder. Sure, th
BlueJeans was crap anyways (Score:2)
And a great rejoicing was heard in all the land (Score:2)
As grateful employees everywhere realized they would no longer be forced to use that piece of shit.
So typically Verizon. Probably chosen by MBA managers instead of the development staff who would have laughed it out of consideration in 5 minutes.
Bad call followed by good call (Score:2)
Shouldn't have bought it, but put a bullet in it if there's no future. Avoid the sunk cost trap.