Does vBulletin just need to start from scratch?

I agree with Icewolf 100%.

 

If Internet Brands is selling, I'm buying.

 

Um. It may look that way, but they are going about it all wrong.

You just don't piss off a lot of your customers and call it "normal business" (and get away with it). You don't start law suits and either lose or drop them and end up making your competition in some cases even stronger. You don't have an acceptance rating of 45% among your current and past employees. You don't get to be known as El-Cheapo or Mr. Cash Grabber. You don't miss marks by a long shot, when it comes to innovations. You don't make the same mistakes over and over again.

A proper business produces quality and adds value and continues to add value to their products and services for their customers. That is how a business makes money and grows. IB has failed to achieve this one basic and main rule of business, especially for vB customers. So, IB may be trying to play it by the book. It seems quite obvious to me though, they have a serious reading comprehension problem.

Scott

 

I guess you are saying, poor management happens in other businesses. You are right about that.

I have no hatred for IB btw. I have a dislike for their business practices and the arrogance they tend to still foster, when they don't really have anything to be arrogant or even proud about. I highly doubt they are making the money they intended to make with vBulletin. We'll never know, because they'll never confirm it. But, you just don't stick as much effort as they have into something only for it to constantly flop as their efforts in vB have, for instance.

And yes, they will never ever become a "Fortune 500" company. I am just wondering though, if it is because of stupidity or ignorance, or maybe even both?

Scott

 

Is this really minimal investment?

All the atlassin software licenses, monthly new developers.......

minimum investment for me would be => 1 junior dev working on vb
1 new version every 6 months and that's it

 

Yeah, but I don't believe what IB has been doing the past 4-5 years is a minimum investment of resources. You don't have a 15 person support crew or a ton of middle management, a relatively large development team, investment in third party development for mobile apps or development of a Facebook app with the intention to "dump it, before its worthless". That might be their direction in the end, because they have no other choice, due to their mismanagement and poor leadership, but that definitely isn't or wasn't IB's intention with vBulletin. They really thought they could do something effective with it. They said themselves, they wanted the brand and the product vBulletin, because so many of their sites run on it. And, although we both will never be able to prove it, my opinion is, they can't show any substantial financial gains with vBulletin. They could with the vB4 pre-sales, but everything after that has had poor results.

What we both are talking about is called mergers and acquisitions and normally businesses buy out other companies to improve their own business and not to "milk them", as you propose is normal. I don't see a any motive in the Wikipedia article I linked to that relates to anything like "milking"of an acquisition. About the only thing that comes close to what you propose is "manager's compensation". But, as the article says, it does NOT add shareholder value, so such motives are rarer to find.

I guess you have your opinion of what IB is doing with vB and I have mine. I say, it is not normal business. I say it is piss poor management and leadership. What you are saying is a good excuse for them to worm out of their misdoings. I could hear it now.....

"Oh yeah. The faux pas with vBulletin? It was planned all along. We didn't really want vBulletin to be successful. We just wanted to gut it out for what it was worth. All that stuff we were doing? You mean the large staff we kept up, the investments in Mobile and the Facebook app? Yeah, all that was just show. We never intended for any of it to be good and that is actually why it all sucked. It was all just an attempt to get vBulletin customers to buy in some more into vBulletin. We never wanted to give them any value. We just wanted their money."



Scott