Yahoo’s Recently Acquired Task Tracking Service Astrid Will Go Dark On August 5 | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo’s Recently Acquired Task Tracking Service Astrid Will Go Dark On August 5

techcrunch.com

29 pointsansimionescu20 comments

This is infuriating. Typical of Yahoo's ham-fisted, clobber-them-over-the-head-with-an-extremely-blunt-instrument approach to things -- 'acquihire' a company that's doing very well and give its users 90 days (90 days? really?) to get the eff out.

If there's someone at Yahoo on here, explain this to me - Do they really do this for the engineering talent? To get the makers of Astrid to stop working on the thing they built, and make them work on Yahoo! Mail, or something like that? Because a lot of those services seem way too far behind the curve to start working on them now.

On the other hand, if they had just made Astrid into "Yahoo! Tasks" I (and thousands of other users) would have just kept it on my phone and browser. Yahoo is missing out on a decent opportunity here.

I worked on the Facebook team that did acquihires for awhile and yes, this is basically it. Hire kid doing awesome, innovative new photo startup, have him build your photos feature and then watch them quit the second they vest, repeat. Does it happen? Yes. Is it a good idea? I can't imagine it is.

It also presents difficultly for companies that develop a reputation of mostly acquiring, and perhaps eventually all big companies who buy small ones: if they actually want to make an acquisition to keep the product(s), will enough users believe them?

I suppose inertia helps prevent this with the customers are consumers, but I gather it's at least something of a problem in initially gaining traction. With the IPO exit firmly closed for all but quasi-black swans like Google and Facebook, why take a chance on a startup when the two most likely outcomes, failure or acquihire, result in their shutting down?

This is a real shame. I have used astrid since the original Motorola Droid was the cool new phone. I purchased the add-ons. It was a great piece of software, and a useful web service that worked like I wanted. And it had no recurring service fees.

Now I have to find a new program. At least they allow me to export my data.

But I definitely dislike when acquired companies dump their product.

The sad thing is, if Yahoo had a replacement with one click move ready, I would be happy to move. But I am certainly not going to transition back to yahoo if I find a service that I like.

Check out Wunderlist.

I am going to check wunderlist and any.do

This is really a strange move. Yahoo have acquired a company with so many users, and now they just sending them away.

from what little I understand about these acquisitions, Yahoo was buying a well-oiled, productive team, not a product or customers.

I switched from Astrid to Due Today (Android) synced with ToodleDo.com a long while back. It's solid and has great widget selections. It's much more powerful than Astrid, Wunderlist, Any.do, etc and lets you do a full GTD setup if you want. You can also just ignore the more advanced bits if they don't interest you. It may be overkill for some folks, but it works well for me.

Today I tried wunderlist and any.do as well. After two hours of playing with them I'll stick to wunderlist. It is more like Astrid, I really don't like the gesture based stuffs in the any.do. Not to mention that wunderlist has a usable website, where any.do only has a chrome extension.

I just downloaded Astrid for the first time about 2 months ago. It's the only to-do app that I've consistently used. It's a shame to have received an email this morning about them closing their doors.

Astrid is recommeding migrating to Wrike, Wunderlist, Sandglaz or Any.Do. Can people comment here on the relative merits of these or other apps?

I've used Any.Do. It's a fairly sparse UI, and somewhat intuitive (if not immediately obvious). That said, I also use OmniFocus, so for what I use it for, I didn't want it to be full-featured.

I loved Astrid. Deleted it as soon as I read this article and now I hate Yahoo just a little bit more.

We are always talking about pivoting and fail fast so why get upset when Yahoo! starts practicing what we are preaching.

because the perspectives of a user and a founder are often orthogonal in the startup scene.

"failing fast" - if they were failing why did yahoo buy them? they weren't failing - they succeeded - why pivot?

pivoting and failing fast are ways to quickly deal with finding a working operations model. It worked so well yahoo bought them. Then closed it down.

???

Is 4 million users a financially viable long term business? How much would you pay annually for Astrid? Would you keep using it if they added a bunch of advertisements to the free edition? A single app isn't a company in the long run.

The decisions around evolving or shutting down a product / service is more complicated than your comment suggests.

I wonder if people would pay $10 a year. Because then that's potentially $40m a year income.

> A single app isn't a company in the long run.

This depends heavily on the single app in question.

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