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Comment by codyps | Hacker News Reader

> Yahoo Acquires 4M-User ‘To Do’ App Astrid, Will Shut It Down In 90 Days

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with what scale Yahoo operates on, but wouldn't it be more beneficial for them to merge Astrid into whatever their plans are rather than drop them and alienate people who were already users?

Or was it just seen as a potential resource hole (with the value of the users seen as negative)?

Can anyone shed some light on what Astrid's business model was?

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it's an acquihire. they are not buying any product. (peanut butter spread too thin, etc)

they just have a lot of money to hire, and nobody wants to work there.

So they do the dumbest thing a company can. Spends 10~30million a head, and they are out the door as soon as their contract allows. (case in point, your host. and he was even a case where yahoo wanted to buy the product...)

oh, and they are so sure everyone is leaving, that the new policy (look it up, was on techcrunch) is to give out annual bonuses instead of pay rises and promotions.

Astid's business model was "Free app, with paid for extra features". The free app was close to feature complete though: the extra features you could buy were fairly small & so buying the upgrades was really just making a donation to the devs. They may have expanded the paid services since I used the app though: I used it for a while and it was pretty good, but I found the UI a bit clunky and difficult to navigate once you wanted to do anything more complex than simple tick-box todo lists and I eventually gave up on it.

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