Surprised to see this in my email inbox today. I wonder what the story and intent are here…
A new era for LastPass
We’re very excited to announce our intent to establish LastPass as an independent company.
We couldn’t be happier and we hope you will be, too. As the leading password manager for individuals and businesses, this change allows us to strategically increase investment and support in LastPass to be able to solve your password problems faster and in even more innovative ways.
You will start to see an enhanced LastPass, on an accelerated timeline. We are working on faster, seamless save and fill, a delightful mobile experience, and even more third-party integrations for businesses, among many other updates. We are expanding our support channels so we can answer your questions faster, right when you need them, and you’ll be welcomed by a new look and feel on our website. We are investing directly in areas that customers like you have told us are most important.
Don’t worry – there are no changes to your account or data in your vault. This is the same great product, now with even more focus on keeping your data safe. You can learn more about this news on our blog.
For those of you who have been with us all along, we thank you for your continued support and passion for LastPass. For those of you who are newer, thanks for being here and we can’t wait to show you what’s next.
I had a feeling that was coming after LogMeIn was purchased by an arm of Elliot Management. Elliot wants companies to stick with what they do best, and password managers aren’t part of remote access.
A good move for LastPass, although too late for me. I have been a pro/family user for at least 8 years, but I didn’t like the move to logmein and the app started causing problems on Android (refused to work with Firefox).
I had discovered the 1Password podcast at the beginning of the year and decided to give it a try. I’ve been very impressed and moved the whole family across.
I want to believe this is good news, but I am afraid it will not be. I suspect they got fat and happy as a subsidiary of a larger company, and will thus need even more money as a spin off back to independence. If they need more money, I worry how they will monetize their users. I don’t feel they can survive by raising prices again, so they might become tempted to throw in ads, or sell your site usage info, or lord knows what.
Some see Elliot as a bad thing for companies, in which case getting LastPass out of there might be for the best. However, between the private-equitiy M.O. of extracting value and dumping the rest and @PHolder’s concern, there might be little left in the future LastPass.
I’ve worked with companies that get involved with Elliot Management. They are the reason EMC was bought by Dell. Another company I deal with is having another round with them now.
That acquisition has been an utter disaster for EMC, customers and employees alike. Their product portfolio is in disarray, product support is in the midst of a nosedive, and sales and technical departments are bleeding personnel at an incredible rate. Nearly every account exec we worked with over there has jumped ship, and shared stories of incredible infighting and confusing policy clash. Should be used as a case study of how not to handle m&a.
It was supposed to happen after COVID as a matter of fact and I even had a direct call with an investor to confirm the knowledge for myself. Once again looking forward to what they bring to the table and their stance on security measures.
I imagine Elliott will keep a hefty stake in the new company. It’s my understanding that Lastpass was a very profitable part (maybe even the most profitable part) of the LogMeIn acquisition. When it comes to private equity it’s all about maximizing profit. Lastpass’s enterprise product is much more important to them in the long term. I expect they’ll downplay the consumer product, similar to Carbonite, and focus on B2B.
It is a shame, I’ve been a long time user of both Carbonite and LastPast and both have really disappointed me in the last year, to the point where I have switched to alternative products.
A few years back, my daughter’s MacBook stopped working with Carbonite, Re-installing didn’t help, it just refused to back up. We switched to Backblaze on that device, but I kept Carbonite on my devices. But it stopped working on my Windows PC as well this year, so I just gave up on it -after 6 weeks, it had re-saved the same 10GB of data and the other 400GB was still unsaved.
Likewise, LastPass stopped working with Firefox on Android and I had to constantly swap back and forth and copy and paste the passwords. I’d been listening to the 1Password podcast for a while, so decided to give them a try. What a difference. A real shame, I had been paying for LastPass for nearly a decade, but it really turned into a disappointment.
Windows also destroyed all the Goodwill Microsoft had built up over the last decade. I’ve now switched to Linux and macOS at home.
And to finish it all off, I stopped using Android as well, out of privacy grounds.
2021 has been a bad year for my tech stalwarts, they have all let me down badly.