back to article What a To-Do! Microsoft snuffs out Wunderlist

If a week is a long time in politics, it must be an eternity at Redmond, where the strategy team is seemingly obliged to create a new one every few minutes. Here's another for you. On Wednesday Microsoft launched a new To-Do app, called er, "To-Do". If that sounds a curious move, it's because it is. Very. Microsoft also said …

  1. tiggity Silver badge

    Pen & paper

    Pen & paper works for me

    Plenty of people use post it notes

    For anything complex that requires proper accountability / audit trails I use software suites devoted to that type of task (pun intended) e.g. agile dev work, tend to use dedicated software that integrates with source code repository, change request system (e.g. JIRA), etc.

  2. ma1010
    Mushroom

    Beyond "shot themselves in the foot."

    Normally, when someone shoots themselves in the foot, they do it once. However, MS seems to have emptied the magazine, reloaded, and continued firing. Perhaps they will stop once there's no foot left to shoot at? Then, perhaps, start on the other one.

    What MS's (I hesitate to use the word strategy since that involves actual thought) is, I can't fathom, except it appears to be as self-destructive as possible. You have to wonder how a company like MS, that really did produce some of the best (and certainly popular) software around has turned into the total insane asylum it appears to be nowadays.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Beyond "shot themselves in the foot."

      I believe microsoft have rather large feet, may be why they keep putting them in things.

    2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      "You have to wonder how a company like MS, that really did produce some of the best (and certainly popular) software around has turned into the total insane asylum it appears to be nowadays"

      Easy : mountains and mountains of money that insulate MS from the cost of failure.

      Any normal company that pours $200 million into something does so with the firm intent of recovering the cost and making money from the investment because its survival is at stake. Microsoft, on the other hand, has money coming in whatever happens, so the fact that it can afford to lose $200 million basically means it has no clear incentive to monetize said $200 million to survive.

      Oh, of course, high-level managers are around implying that the investment had better bear fruit, but then they run off to pay attention to the next billion-dollar investment and everything is lost in the maelstrom of day-to-day business. Then, at some point later on, somebody stumbles on the file and takes a look, brings it to some high-level manglement's attention and gets told "eh, that thing ? Didn't you follow last week's management session ? It's out-of-date, no longer part of our new outlook. Get rid of it."

      Because Microsoft can still afford to change outlook every week. Companies that fight for survival cannot - they have to stick to their guns because they can't afford new ones. Not until the investment has paid for itself, that is.

  3. Necronomnomnomicon

    Wunderlist being axed is a shame

    I've been using it for a little over two years, and it's been a great app. My and my other half do our shopping using it. Add everything into Wunderlist, and when we get to the shop we each take separate sections and tick it off as we go. Halves the time it takes to do a shop. I wunder what Microsoft will do to recompense Pro users? I didn't pay for my subscription (it came free when I used the app in Germany, thanks Deutsche Telecom!) but I'm sure many did.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Wunderlist being axed is a shame

      It is! I used it this past year on my iDevices. Wunderlist was a great find, and it worked on the iWatch, when the first party reminder/notes did not. Eventually my situation sorted and I went back to those recently, but it's too bad that they are being embraced/extinguished with a bit of extending into a different product of a similar class. But like the article states; how many list apps does one need? The answer is one, one that integrates/shares to the other devices in an unobtrusive, intuitive way. And it rarely surprises me. I don't need surprises, or adverts, or redirection of my attention away from the task at hand. But I digress, shopping with Wunderlist on the wrist was nice and easy, and no fumbling with other things while I'm picking out raspberries, or Raspberry Pis.

      Also, don't you wipe off other peoples devices before using them? I do. Especially for kids. Those critters don't know how to keep a device clean. And the ladies, okay nice as they are, have you ever used a ladies phone after it's been in use? It's covered with makeup and who knows what else from the depths of the mysterious purse regions? I keep mine in a hermetically sealed, air tight, virus-proof container and then put that in a Ziploc bag filled with hand sanitizing gel, then place that inside a box with garlic to ward off vampires and perhaps werewolves. Some people even use the devices while on the toilet. I just. I mean. Holy cow! What the heck is going on?! Stop it!

  4. Zippy's Sausage Factory
    Facepalm

    Microsoft's strategy these days seems to be to just bun stuff down while building new stuff somewhere else.

    So while hardcore Wunderlist users mosey on somewhere else (Todoist, maybe), MS have probably lost a good set of paying customers there.

    And as for Outlook's tasks being useful, that would require joined-up cross-department thinking. Microsoft's never been good at that. Internecine civil war, on the other hand, THAT is something it knows how to do...

    1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
      WTF?

      SOP for Microsoft

      Buy a useful thing

      can it

      come out with a half baked replacement

      sit back and wonder why all the customers have gone elsewhere.

      Well, that's one way to run a company into the ground eventually.

      In the meantime, take footgun and send a barrage into feet.

  5. Wheaty73
    Windows

    At least its called "To Do"

    And not some hyper cool with it name like 2du that avoids correct spelling and essential vowels.

    1. fidodogbreath

      Re: At least its called "To Do"

      not some hyper cool with it name like 2du that avoids correct spelling

      E.g., "Wunderlist?"

  6. Tim 11

    "the only task management app built on an enterprise cloud..."

    There is some truth in that, at least if you only consider Microsoft apps. If there's one thing Exchange/Outlook definitely ain't, "built for cloud" would be a fair description

  7. AMBxx Silver badge
    FAIL

    Dear Microsoft

    Stop pissing about with toytown apps. Some of us have work to do.

    P.S. When can I have Exchange Tasks on Windows Phone.

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: Dear Microsoft

      "toytown apps" indeed.

      I wonder how long it would take me to develop something like that. 2 hours? 3?

      maybe 5 minutes - a shared google doc plain-text file that you can invite others to be able to view and/or edit.

  8. Mage Silver badge
    Facepalm

    This is rooted in 15 years+ ago

    When I heard that the team leader meetings for XP development used an auditorium I knew the end was near.

    Then docx and the Ribbon and "adaptive menus"* showed the plot was lost. Then Vista ditched all the good ideas in favour of direct 3D and Aero.

    Windows 8.x? (Stupidity of Phone / Zune GUI for Desktop).

    Windows 10. (So many levels of stupid).

    It's no surprise. Look how they messed up Skype and confused people by renaming the unrelated pre-existing voice application "Skype for Business".

    Or the debacle over ARM vs x86 surface / Windows.

    Or wasting all the billions on buying nothing at all from Nokia.

    Obviously Management is clueless.

    [* What use are menus where the least used things vanish? Menus need to be unchanging and show every option, always, though grey out ones that can't currently be used in the app. This why on XP and later I disabled "hide task icons" and "personlised menus".]

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: This is rooted in 15 years+ ago

      When I heard that the team leader meetings for XP development used an auditorium I knew the end was near.

      15 years isn't "near".

    2. Zakhar

      Re: This is rooted in 15 years+ ago

      Your are right, and that's when I moved to Linux: when I was force out of XP by non sense-Vista. So glad I did that!

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yet another Microsoft acquisition with its innards sucked dry, then discarded

    Remember the Sunrise calendar app?

    There are more examples but you get the idea.

  10. Mage Silver badge

    Actually, Outlook

    I thought the ONLY reason to have the insecure Outlook application was MS Server integration with Scheduling/Calendar. Otherwise if you only want email, there are better, safer solutions for over 15 years.

    Otherwise why would people buy Exchange Server and an MS OS to run it? I'm baffled that they don't have a fully Exchange/Sharepoint/Outlook client compatible with and syncing to desktop on iOS, Android, etc for years to support Exchange sales and maintain lock in to MS eco-system. Why on earth did they buy Wunderlist at all, unless to do a Fitbit - Pebble and kill it at once. Like Amazon did with Mobibooks.

  11. Sam Adams the Dog

    On Letting a Thousand Flowers Bloom

    If you're going to let a thousand flowers bloom, you'd better be willing to weed the garden.

  12. handleoclast

    ToDo

    1) Take money from customers.

    2) Fuck the customers.

    3) Repeat from step 1.

  13. bed

    Don’t conflate OneNote and Outlook Tasks

    Outlooks Tasks/To-Do-List has never, ever, been developed to exploit its potential possibly because, if it did, it would eat into shared Project usage. That is no excuse however for not building some half-hearted functionality into the Outlook android app such as there is, in a limited fashion, in the Windows Phone Outlook app.

    Offering OneNote as a substitute misses the point – of integration with calendars, alerts, rules and so on. It would be nice to think that OneNote (a much underappreciated application) might morph into a tasks substitute, provide shared tasks functionality, or fully integrate with Exchange Server, but that would be yet another strategy – so, fully expect such an announcement to arrive shortly – followed by development and abandonment.

  14. Captain DaFt

    "We did recently compliment Microsoft for being almost coherent by having only two Slack rivals (Teams and Yammer), and not five. Or ten. At least compared to Google."

    Well that's your mistake right there! Never hint they're doing anything different from Google. They'll drop everything else and race to look like they're doing the same!

  15. ScissorHands
    Devil

    I got what I wanted in the end

    What I wanted was an Outlook.com Tasks client for Android that would sync up with Windows 10. The only option on Android was the paid version of Blackberry Hub+, and NOTHING in Windows 10 (apart from desktop Outlook - oh you mean that for those without Outlook a note-taking app called OneNote was supposed to do tasks instead of the PIM suite? Really?)

    Now get some integration going. When I write "call Geoff", show me a dropdown of all the Geoffs in my contacts and let me link one of them.

  16. ThomR

    Outlook tasks a victim of multi-version AD schema management complexity?

    IIRC (and yes, I could be wrong)...the reason why tasks died a slow and painful death was that the Exchange user and configuration AD storage schema for tasks was very different from the Outlook schema for storing tasks locally. So, there was at minimum a translation layer. Because Exchange's property schema is in AD, every schema-change-requiring feature added to tasks by the Outlook client teams, forced the wholesale update of AD schema across all organizations. Well, add in the complexity of long transitions from one version of Outlook to another version within the org, where both Outlook (and thus task schema) must co-exist for months, if not years, and you end up with a nightmare in AD schema management. And of course, those wily end-users didn't have to fix it, they just had to complain to their IT teams that their tasks weren't working. Once the nightmare of schema management made it to the C-level, it was not uncommon for the edict to come out that there was no official support for tasks within the org, and they would not be stored in the main Exchange mailbox stores. Ouch! Others will know more precisely, but that's what it always seemed to come down to...oh, and having to document both the task file format in local PST/OSTs and the Exchange schema in AD became an ongoing evolutionary nightmare.

  17. Kapudan-i Derya

    Microsoft started dying after Windows 7. From then everything they touch turns into shit.

  18. localzuk Silver badge

    Illogical

    Why would you take a functional and popular app and aim to kill it by creating a new one copying some features from it, just so you can interact with your cloud service? Why not just add the cloud stuff to Wunderlist? Why not rename Wunderlist if they hate the name so much?

    To-Do is a stupid name, as it is impossible to market as to-do is too generic.

    They really seem to be losing the plot at MS.

    1. stephanh

      Re: Illogical

      Microsoft apparently likes those bland, generic product names. MS Word, Windows, Office, Windows Phone, Surface.

  19. hellwig

    How did we ever get work done...

    WTF is Yammer? My company moved us from something call Colab (an internal tool?) to Yammer, and I don't know WTF either of those things is/was. Yet somehow, I'm still able to do my job, amazing!

    I'm looking at my Outlook task list right now (I have a dedicated Outlook monitor). All I see is a bunch of emails I marked as "follow up" and promptly forgot about. Do people actually use that thing for todo lists or tasking? My oldest "task" is just the first email I haven't archived yet.

    Oh well, guess this just wasn't directed at me.

    1. stephanh

      Re: How did we ever get work done...

      Yammer is a "social network for companies". If that doesn't make you run away screaming, you have probably something like "Product Evangelist" in your job title.

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