While that’s not the latest news out there, I still want to give it a thought. On the 1st of May Yahoo announced that it has acquired Astrid. Just in case you were not aware of: Astrid was (it still is) a great tool for managing taks. It became my favourite To-Do-list during the last years, and I used it heavily.

I especially loved their mobile Android app, the synch which was not limited as it is in the free version of RememberTheMilk and their browser application, which was clean and quite efficient. You could also share your lists with friends or colleagues, turning the application into a perfect organisation tool which also was suitable for small organisations. Plus there was Astrid, the little pink squid, which tries to fight your procrastination habits with motivational quotes. My all time favourite: “Every time you postpone that task, a little piece of me dies inside”. Now that is a way of motivating someone. And she was so proud of me when I finally finished reading that book.

Now you might say that being acquired by Yahoo is not the worst thing that can happen, especially if your name is David Karp (who now owns $ 200 million more than he did just a couple of days ago), but in that case Marissa Mayer’s team has decided to shut Astrid down. That’s it. They won’t continue to maintain the service for more than 90 days. Astrid’s team says that they are “thrilled” about the acquisition and happy to “join the mobile team and continue this work with Yahoo!’s goal of ‘making the world’s daily habits more inspiring and entertaining'”. (see: http://blog.astrid.com/blog/2013/05/01/yahoo-acquires-astrid). Ah, and by the way, Yahoo does not even consider that even important enough to list it on their company news website.

To put this straight: Astrid had about 4 million users, some of them where premium – paying – customers, who now have to look for an alternative. Yahoo does not offer a suitable alternative. Getting rid of your competition by buying them and closing them down is a comprehensible tactic, but leaving their customers without any option is quite a bad move. This applies to me as well; I’ll be going back to RememberTheMilk, which is also a great To-Do-list manager, but only a second choice to me.