welcome back to the american product institute.
last friday, we published a letter detailing the happenings in technology (specifically amazon), the opportunity of the week (vaccinetech), and the featured new feature of the week (upcoming view for todoist).
on tuesday, we published the moscow method, the institute’s guide to ruthless prioritization. read it. use it. be conscious of what you do and why you do it.
today, we discuss why the sun sometimes sets on good software.
the wunderlist sunset
productivity software acts as a second brain for individual users and collaborative teams. this week, microsoft finalized their digital lobotomy of the few remaining stragglers still using wunderlist for their task management. out of some combination of loyalty, apathy, and denial, a small percentage of a once large and vibrant userbase was holding on until the app’s dying day. may 6th was that day. wunderlist is no more.
this sunset had been on the horizon since back in 2017, when microsoft simultaneously announced the eventual “retirement” of wunderlist and the release of a new app: microsoft to-do. this when microsoft had just paid between $100 million and $200 million for wunderlist in 2015. the rare build-and-buy decision that few in the industry can afford to make.
so why decide to kill wunderlist?
acquiring and eventually sunsetting popular applications with a renowned user experience is the modus operandi of the seattle software titan. they executed a similar strategy with the beloved sunrise calendar app back in 2015, working with the acquihired product team to ship-of-theseus features from sunrise into outlook until finally casting aside the redundant carcass of the original app one year later.
their strategy for the 2014 acquisition of the mobile email app, acompli, was even easier.
change the name.
less than two months after it was acquired, acompli was renamed and rebranded as “outlook mobile.” with the stroke of a pen on a check and a few minor ui changes, the infamously archaic desktop email client suddenly had a genuinely delightful mobile experience.
but wunderlist has not been slapped with a new coat of microsoft paint. it’s been taken out behind the microsoft shed.
the reason appears be tied to the technical requirements for microsoft’s application strategy - one that relies heavily on the integration effects of their unified suite of products.
wunderlist was built on amazon web services. the microsoft suite is, quite naturally, built on microsoft’s in-house aws competitor: azure. as wunderlist founder and former ceo christian reber explained on german twitter, there were “technical challenges” to porting the entire app from one service to the other. a challenge, yes, but surely one that microsoft would have known about prior to the acquisition.
perhaps this was just a public excuse. perhaps an optimistic product team anticipated an easier post-acquisition technical transition. perhaps this was the plan all along. acquisition as a product spec.
in many ways, though, a fresh build makes the most sense for microsoft. total interoperability between applications at every technical level is a natural prerequisite for their products. the newly branded microsoft 365 suite - formerly known as the office 365 suite - is not differentiated on the user experience of the individual apps, but rather the unified experience of the overall suite. for something as critical as professional productivity, building a microsoft to-do app that is cleanly integrated with outlook and word and excel and powerpoint and onenote and teams and everything else is far more valuable than offering the best possible to-do app. especially when the company is explicitly leaning on artificial intelligence as their feature of the future. ai needs clean data.
no doubt disgruntled former wunderlist powerusers will be able to spot all the ways that microsoft to-do is substandard. their second brain has been ripped from their second skull. but microsoft 365 users have already gained a powerful productivity app, modeled after the best of the wunderlist specifications and fully-integrated into their existing solutions for communication, document creation, and everything else the professional needs at work. those are the integration effects of the microsoft suite. and those effects grease the skids of enterprise purchases and renewals alike.
in the bargaining stage of grief for his lost creation, reber appealed to microsoft ceo satya nadella and gm of to-do marcus ash on english twitter, offering to buy back the company.
they did not respond. at least not on twitter.
now with wunderlist finally put down after limping through two years as a lame duck app, those lobotomized stragglers have one, final, uncatalogued to do:
find a new productivity app.
microsoft is vying to move them over to microsoft to do. the internet is ripe with ample listicles of alternatives. and the american product institute can enthusiastically endorse our own official productivity app: todoist, which can easily import old tasks from wunderlist.
we can only hope that whatever app these wunderlist veterans choose doesn’t end up being acquired by alphabet to address the crippling minimalism of google tasks.
suffering through one digital lobotomy is bad enough.
cover art by emile claus - sunset over waterloo bridge - 1916 - public domain
