
Yahoo’s Recently Acquired Task Tracking Service Astrid Will Go Dark On August 5 - ansimionescu
http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/06/astrid-goes-dark-august-5-goodnight-sweet-squid/
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parennoob
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.

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ryguytilidie
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.

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lsiebert
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.

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

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

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JohnTHaller
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.

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andrasokros
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.

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matthuggins
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.

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

~~~
bdcravens
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.

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

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

~~~
mgkimsal
"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.

???

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bretpiatt
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.

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

