Boeing announces $10.55 billion deal to divest Jeppesen, ForeFlight, AerData and OzRunways to Thoma Bravo

[Max Clark]

Not really surprising, but big news. I'd expect subscriptions will go up as a result - this might finally get me off Foreflight and onto FlyGarmin

BREAKING: Boeing announces $10.55 billion deal to divest Jeppesen, ForeFlight, AerData and OzRunways to Thoma Bravo in an all cash transaction. Earlier reporting suggested the sale, which attracted multiple bidders, would be closer to $6 billion. Deal close expected by year end.

[redbaron1982]

WTF? I hate when aviation products are owned by businesses that don't share the passion for aviation. I guess I will take a look at Garmin Pilot too.

+ I can use my non Apple tablet/phone that I have laying around as a backup.

Edited Tuesday at 02:37 PM by redbaron1982

[dkkim73]

IIRC correctly the model for a lot of PE shops is to trim costs to get revenue #s better, imputing higher valuation, and then flip. Don't know anything about these guys, though. Definitely I am not a finance guy. But I have yet to hear of any Private Equity deal that resulted in some great external creation of lasting value in any industry, though. Usually great brands becoming sad or getting chopped up. 

Good thing I was already on the verge of using Garmin Pilot. It won't take much to push me. 

 

[redbaron1982]

10 minutes ago, dkkim73 said:

IIRC correctly the model for a lot of PE shops is to trim costs to get revenue #s better, imputing higher valuation, and then flip. Don't know anything about these guys, though. Definitely I am not a finance guy. But I have yet to hear of any Private Equity deal that resulted in some great external creation of lasting value in any industry, though. Usually great brands becoming sad or getting chopped up. 

Good thing I was already on the verge of using Garmin Pilot. It won't take much to push me. 

 

Yeah, exactly, I have some personal experience with PE, and the model is exactly that. Is not even focusing on the bottom line of the company, is just playing financial tricks to make the numbers look better and then in 3 or 4 years sell it for a profit.

PE is one of the worst things that can happen to a company...

[dzeleski]

Just as the Avidyne database subscriptions were reduced to a reasonable rate. Probably gonna end up voting with my wallet on this one but we will see.

[dkkim73]

I don't begrudge the pioneers at Foreflight who benefitted from selling to Boeing their loot (hopefully they got some and not just the last venture round), but it would be great to see more of a "going concern" approach with long-term stewardship. Kind of like the 37signals software model, at least for a while. 

For any annoyance I've had at Garmin, it is dwarfed by their consistent quality and fairly consistent value. They were exceedingly generous with updates and legacy support early on, and have remained committed to aviation even while expanding into other niches. I was floored by the scale of their enterprise in Kansas. It's a big company. 

 

[Paul Thomas]

Foreflight was developed in part with AOPA's money. I'm shocked that AOPA or EAA has not built a good app and make it free to their members. That would be a perk with real value and be an easy way to retain members.

If the cost was to really get out there due to PE coming in, it wouldn't take much to get a group of engineers to develop a competing application. There are also still some free applications out there but I don't know how well they compete as I use foreflight.

[PeteMc]

No need to speculate too much.  Equity firms usually buy things to sell them.  So give it a couple of months and there will probably be a new owner again for the various pieces.  Maybe as one package, maybe split up. 

 

[PeteMc]

7 minutes ago, Paul Thomas said:

I'm shocked that AOPA or EAA has not built a good app and make it free to their members.

Cost is WAY too much for them to do that.  If you remember they did have an App for a while to give you Airport info etc.  They had to close that down, and my guess is that it was for cost. 

 

[NickG]

I've been using Garmin Pilot for 2 years. Very happy with it. Has a few features superior to foreflight and a few features missing. Interfaces perfectly with my all Garmin glass panel.

[201Mooniac]

I've been using Garmin Pilot for a long time now and am very happy with it but I've stil been using Jepp charts as I really prefer the visuals on the approach charts.  If this means the prices go up even more, it likely will no longer be worth the added cost and I'll get used to using flightcharts which will allow me to save some money with a Garmin data plan.

[N201MKTurbo]

As a professional software developer, You are underestimating what it would take to develop an application like ForeFlight.

[shawnd]

Wouldn't it be nice ... to have Garmin buy out Jeppesen and Foreflight? They can augment their own product and data line with these and would make a solid offering to the aviation community. Albeit, might be starting to be a monopoly...

[redbaron1982]

12 minutes ago, N201MKTurbo said:

As a professional software developer, You are underestimating what it would take to develop an application like ForeFlight.

+1

Getting something basic I'd say that is a ~1MUSD investment, getting to the level that foreflight is, i think it can go as high as 100MUSD, or more

[EricJ]

I used Avare, one of the free EFBs for many years and liked it a lot.    The developer decided to stop support and start over using some of the newer development tools that make cross-development possible (to multiple platforms simultaneously).   So now we have AvareX, which was developed by a few volunteers relatively quickly and is already reasonably full-featured as EFBs go, and is available on Android, Apple, Microsoft, etc..   I don't like the new user interfaces in AvareX, or the lack of documentation, so I switched to iFly, but I think AvareX is a bit of an example proof that it might not be as hard these days as it once was due to the modern software tool sets.   It's definitely not trivial or inexpensive if you wanted to fund a similar effort, but it's apparently not the hurdle it may have been in the past.

So there still are free EFBs out that that are very usable, and low-cost subscription alternatives like iFly.    Avare, AvareX and iFly and other EFBs all have free charts and plates, so there are no fees related to the charts or plates.    They're all still geo-referenced, too.    I think one of the pressures on Jeppesen has been that they weren't offering much value-add compared to the free government charts used in many of these other EFBs, so I suspect that's part of why their prices came down.

It'll be interesting to see what happens from here.   This acquisition is just capitalists doing capitalism.   I'm told it makes everything more efficient. 

[redbaron1982]

5 minutes ago, EricJ said:

I used Avare, one of the free EFBs for many years and liked it a lot.    The developer decided to stop support and start over using some of the newer development tools that make cross-development possible (to multiple platforms simultaneously).   So now we have AvareX, which was developed by a few volunteers relatively quickly and is already reasonably full-featured as EFBs go, and is available on Android, Apple, Microsoft, etc..   I don't like the new user interfaces in AvareX, or the lack of documentation, so I switched to iFly, but I think AvareX is a bit of an example proof that it might not be as hard these days as it once was due to the modern software tool sets.   It's definitely not trivial or inexpensive if you wanted to fund a similar effort, but it's apparently not the hurdle it may have been in the past.

So there still are free EFBs out that that are very usable, and low-cost subscription alternatives like iFly.    Avare, AvareX and iFly and other EFBs all have free charts and plates, so there are no fees related to the charts or plates.    They're all still geo-referenced, too.    I think one of the pressures on Jeppesen has been that they weren't offering much value-add compared to the free government charts used in many of these other EFBs, so I suspect that's part of why their prices came down.

It'll be interesting to see what happens from here.   This acquisition is just capitalists doing capitalism.   I'm told it makes everything more efficient. 

The beauty of software development is that 99% of the cost is to pay a salary for a team of devs. So if you get a team of 10 (or if you go open source, maybe hundred) of motivated softwade developer pilots, I'm sure you can build the best EFB for, almost, free... just people donating their time for the cause.

[N201MKTurbo]

Thoma Bravo business model is to expand the companies they acquire. Aviation is kind of stagnant. I think everybody that wants ForeFlight already has it. I’m not sure how they are planning to expand it. The same with Jeppesen. 

[shawnd]

Jeppesen has the advantage of being the go-to charting solution for airlines (as far as I can tell). As a result, I imagine as new airlines pop up across the world, they become new potential customers for Jeppesen. 

[N201MKTurbo]

6 minutes ago, redbaron1982 said:

The beauty of software development is that 99% of the cost is to pay a salary for a team of devs. So if you get a team of 10 (or if you go open source, maybe hundred) of motivated softwade developer pilots, I'm sure you can build the best EFB for, almost, free... just people donating their time for the cause.

If you have to pay 10 developers and the admins to do the admin stuff along with building, data infrastructure, development tools licenses and such, you are looking at 3-5 million a year. Software developers are in great demand these days and don’t come cheap. 
 

Also, don’t forget ForeFlight has an enterprise operation that serves up all the data the apps consume and produce. That needs to be developed and operated also. It isn’t cheap.

[Vance Harral]

6 minutes ago, redbaron1982 said:

The beauty of software development is that 99% of the cost is to pay a salary for a team of devs. So if you get a team of 10 (or if you go open source, maybe hundred) of motivated softwade developer pilots, I'm sure you can build the best EFB for, almost, free... just people donating their time for the cause.

This statement suggests you don't have any experience managing large-scale software development.  The most likely outcome of getting a team of 10 - or worse yet a hundred - "motivated software developer pilots" is completely unusable chaos.

Yes, there are any number of free EFBs that are reasonably functional, because lots of people have the same idea as you.  A single developer can actually turn out something mildly usable in not too much time.  But as features are added, the things that make something as complicated as an EFB actually usable, include interface design (which is *not* coding), a very robust verification environment, documentation, and user support.  The vast majority of "motivated software developers" are terrible at these things.  Ask me how I know.

There is a good reason that the vast majority of EFB users choose a paid product backed by a large company.

[EricJ]

14 minutes ago, redbaron1982 said:

The beauty of software development is that 99% of the cost is to pay a salary for a team of devs. So if you get a team of 10 (or if you go open source, maybe hundred) of motivated softwade developer pilots, I'm sure you can build the best EFB for, almost, free... just people donating their time for the cause.

That's pretty much what AvareX is (and Avare before it).   There are some other open-source EFBs, too, that are similar but seem to be not as popular.

[Vance Harral]

2 minutes ago, N201MKTurbo said:

Software developers are in great demand these days and don’t come cheap. 

That has been true for most of the history of software development, but is a lot less true today.  Between offshoring and AI code generation, software development is being rapidly commoditized.  The quality of the resultant software is about what you'd expect, but that's not going to stem the tide.  Software in general - including EFB software, will almost certainly follow the same path as airline service, culminating in almost unbelievably inexpensive products, that are incredibly annoying to use.

[redbaron1982]

3 minutes ago, Vance Harral said:

This statement suggests you don't have any experience managing large-scale software development.  The most likely outcome of getting a team of 10 - or worse yet a hundred - "motivated software developer pilots" is completely unusable chaos.

Yes, there are any number of free EFBs that are reasonably functional, because lots of people have the same idea as you.  A single developer can actually turn out something mildly usable in not too much time.  But as features are added, the things that make something as complicated as an EFB actually usable, include interface design (which is *not* coding), a very robust verification environment, documentation, and user support.  The vast majority of "motivated software developers" are terrible at these things.  Ask me how I know.

There is a good reason that the vast majority of EFB users choose a paid product backed by a large company.

Lol. Yeah, right. A team of motivated developers has developed Linux, the most used operating system ever. 

There are way to many open source success stories. 

You sound very much like Steve balmer laughing at the iPhone and iPod. 

[N201MKTurbo]

1 minute ago, Vance Harral said:

That has been true for most of the history of software development, but is a lot less true today.  Between offshoring and AI code generation, software development is being rapidly commoditized.  The quality of the resultant software is about what you'd expect, but that's not going to stem the tide.  Software in general - including EFB software, will almost certainly follow the same path as airline service, culminating in almost unbelievably inexpensive products, that are incredibly annoying to use.

Microsoft keeps adding AI features to Visual Studio. It is more annoying than useful. Sometimes it is like magic, but most times it is just flat wrong and annoying. I keep trying to turn it off, but it keeps coming back.

[shawnd]

9 minutes ago, N201MKTurbo said:

Microsoft keeps adding AI features to Visual Studio. It is more annoying than useful. Sometimes it is like magic, but most times it is just flat wrong and annoying. I keep trying to turn it off, but it keeps coming back.

Exactly and the unfamiliar with take the code produced by AI as-is. It requires experience to detect when it's wrong or sub optimal. That costs $$ if you want to avoid costlier mistakes in production.