Foreflight - major layoffs

A

ateamer

En-Route
Joined
Dec 19, 2007
Messages
2,981
Location
Port St. Lucie, FL
Display Name
ateamer
Home Airfield
FD88
From Reddit:
With no warning we were all fired yesterday morning via email. I would expect worsening service over the coming weeks and months, as many engineering teams who supported various features were simply removed with no opportunity for knowledge transfer. This happened due to ForeFlight's sale to private equity (Thoma Bravo) last year, who plans to move all engineering offshore. ForeFlight was an incredible company to work for with amazing benefits and so much emphasis on pilot safety and support as well as product quality. This is a huge shame and disappointment and many incredible engineers lost their jobs.

 
Here come all the doom and gloom. Could be true, could be nothing.
 
Did Boeing not learn anything from spinning off Spirit, altho that wasn’t the exactly same as offshoring.

Where will QC be located?
 
I was never enamored with FF because I'm outside the iWorld. My impression of it (not having ever used it) is that it became larded up with many superfluous features over the last ~5 years.
 
Maybe AI will be doing the work of those that are no longer there. How bad could it be?
 
And I just renewed my subscription
 
murphey said:
Did Boeing not learn anything from spinning off Spirit, altho that wasn’t the exactly same as offshoring.

Where will QC be located?
Click to expand...

Why would Boeing care? They don’t own either FF or Jepp anymore. Sale was final last year.

Half Fast said:
…Boeing pretty much wrecks whatever it touches. The legacy of Neutron Jack continues......
Click to expand...

See above. Jepp, FF, AerData, and OzRunways were included in the sale to Thoma Bravo.
 
Kent Wien said:
I just went to ForeFlight to cancel. It turns out you can’t cancel mid subscription, but you do need to turn off auto-renew. Garmin, here I come.
Click to expand...
Which is owned by institutional investors, corporations, etc.

Hopefully we are a big enough market to hold their attention. The only email I get from them are promotional consumer products
 
midwestpa24 said:
PE will be the death of many industry. I understand that business must turn a profit, but when the profit is the only goal a business dies.
Click to expand...

Anecdotal of course, but my one experience with private equity is they will squeeze every last dollar from the company, then stop paying vendors, and when the vendors stop sending raw materials they declare bankruptcy and chain the doors.
 
Crap. I sold my Garmin stock last week to pay for the kitchen remodel.

On the positive side, my RPi Stratux works with Garmin Pilot.
Better with the 175 GPS, too.

Subscription is up in June, I'll re-evaluate in May.
 
Last edited:
Rats. I didn't see the PE thing. I just renewed, too. Oh well, we'll see how it goes.

ForeFlight already has had an unusually good run. They commited the cardinal sin of professional software development; they picked a platform and made a good product for it, instead of the usual CADT / rewrite to platform du jour every 18-36 months that en****tifies everything these days.

You're supposed to:
* build on the backs of the beta testers and then pivot, and/or
* make a lowest common denominator that runs poorly on all platforms, and/or
* collapse under your own weight of feature creep that nobody asked for, and/or
* be dual use, where superficially it looks like an EFB but in reality it's sigint for advertisers who are the actual paying customers.

How are you supposed to extract more money from the customer when they are satisfied with the product? You can't. You need to fire those deadbeat customers.

When you accidentally make something that's too good, you no longer have leverage, so you have to remove functionality, wait five minutes so they forget, and then you can sell it back to them again like it's new. This pattern happens all the time.
 
I went and renewed for a year right after reading this. I locked in the current price, got credit for the remainder of my current subscription and now I'll wait and see how it goes.

I've tried FlyQ and Garmin Pilot, didn't like either one near as much as FF. As of this morning, it's the best. A year from now, I'll re-evaluate.
 
PE are like vultures. They are ugly and nobody likes them, but they provide a necessary function. Without vultures and PE, the roads and markets would be littered with rotting carcasses.

There are multiple free or discounted apps that provide 95% of FF functionality, but their programming team consists of 3 guys working from home. That says the FF business model has run out of growth potential and cannot sustain a huge US-based development team.

Boeing made a mistake buying FF. They were never going to benefit from it. They needed a way to unload the distraction from their core business, and PE gave them a way to recover some of their investment.

PE didn't ruin FF. They just pulled back the curtain on what was obvious to those on the inside.
 
Ed Haywood said:
PE are like vultures. They are ugly and nobody likes them, but they provide a necessary function. Without vultures and PE, the roads and markets would be littered with rotting carcasses.

There are multiple free or discounted apps that provide 95% of FF functionality, but their programming team consists of 3 guys working from home. That says the FF business model has run out of growth potential and cannot sustain a huge US-based development team.

Boeing made a mistake buying FF. They were never going to benefit from it. They needed a way to unload the distraction from their core business, and PE gave them a way to recover some of their investment.

PE didn't ruin FF. They just pulled back the curtain on what was obvious to those on the inside.
Click to expand...

I agree and would just like to add that the additional Boeing overhead costs certainly didn’t help FF’s competitive position.
 
Half Fast said:
I agree and would just like to add that the additional Boeing overhead costs certainly didn’t help FF’s competitive position.
Click to expand...

That overhead may have been a rounding error for Frontier, but it became budget dust once DOD started buying FF.

The largest growth market for FF is outside the US.
 
Depends on the private equity involvment, but not all are going to bust and rape. A lot of them are aggregators. We got bought out by a private equity concern and it was quite reasonable (in fact, we were in a good period of growth). The exit from PE was either an IPO or getting sold again. In our case, it was the latter. They shopped us around to a few big companies (including Boeing, which I'd already had run-ins with when they bought other companies in our space). We ended up getting sold to Textron, which initially seemed reasonable, but it went downhill fast. And yes, they fired me over the phone while I was on vacation.
 
AV8R_87 said:
Lovely. Not surprised, unfortunately.
Maybe you guys should download AvareX and donate some money to the development team.
Click to expand...
As a long-time Avare user, I installed AvareX when I got a new phone and was immediately befuddled. Is there a manual somewhere?
 
These equity and investment firms have been going around and buying FBOs, they really don’t end up doing anything positive.
 
Half Fast said:
I agree and would just like to add that the additional Boeing overhead costs certainly didn’t help FF’s competitive position.
Click to expand...

That's a common PE scenario. Companies fail to adapt over time, and get to the point where their overhead is suffocating them but can't get past the emotional barriers to action. That is especially the case in shrinking markets and dying industries.

It is easy to manage a growing business. It is hard AF to manage a declining business. I have done both.

Office supplies are a good example. I recall horror stories about PE doing bad things to Office Depot and Staples. But it's hard to think of a standalone retail market where demand has driven off a cliff as fast as office supplies. Maybe horseshoes in 1908? Record stores in 2001?
 
It could be time to just get out of aviation, but a move to Garmin is almost certain in the next two years. It was good while it lasted, but Private Equity ruins everything.
 
Lindberg said:
As a long-time Avare user, I installed AvareX when I got a new phone and was immediately befuddled. Is there a manual somewhere?
Click to expand...

No manual for AvareX that I know of. IMHO, AvareX doesn't need a manual as it is super simple to use. If you run into any glitches, you can post your question on the Avare forum and someone will answer it. And all my other favorite open source software don't have manuals either. My Linux distribution (Slackware) doesn't have a manual. Commercial products tend to have a manual, but I am not sure if that is really for helping customers or to state their liability limits.
 
DesertNomad said:
It could be time to just get out of aviation, but a move to Garmin is almost certain in the next two years. It was good while it lasted, but Private Equity ruins everything.
Click to expand...
"Get out of aviation because foreflight is sucking" is a really odd take to me. That seems tantamount to saying "I should have just stayed with X-Plane" :confused2:
 
schmookeeg said:
"Get out of aviation because foreflight is sucking" is a really odd take to me. That seems tantamount to saying "I should have just stayed with X-Plane" :confused2:
Click to expand...
It’s all the aviation companies being bought by PE… the costs go up, quality goes down. My planes are still worth something for now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top