Buying a competitor does not automatically kill the competitor.
Sometimes the acquired product grows.
Sometimes it stays independent.
Sometimes it becomes a feature inside the buyer’s platform.
And sometimes it disappears.
Wunderlist provides a clean example of the last path.
Microsoft bought Wunderlist, then retired it
Microsoft announced its acquisition of 6Wunderkinder, the company behind Wunderlist, on June 2, 2015. At the time, Microsoft praised Wunderlist as a market-leading to-do app known for simplicity, design, and broad availability across mobile, desktop, and web platforms. See Microsoft’s 2015 acquisition announcement.
Wunderlist did not disappear immediately.
Microsoft continued operating it while developing Microsoft To Do and providing migration tools.
Then the independent product ended.
Microsoft’s lifecycle record lists May 7, 2020 as the end of support for Wunderlist and directs users to migration guidance. See Microsoft’s Wunderlist lifecycle page.
That produces a straightforward before-and-after record:
- 2015: Microsoft acquires a distinct cross-platform task service.
- 2020: Wunderlist support ends and users are directed toward Microsoft’s replacement.
The user loses an alternative even when migration exists
A migration tool can preserve tasks.
It cannot preserve the existence of the old competitor.
Before the shutdown, a user could choose between Microsoft products and Wunderlist as a separately branded service with its own design decisions and roadmap.
Afterward, that particular choice no longer existed.
This does not mean Microsoft eliminated all competition in task management. Todoist, Things, TickTick, Apple Reminders, Google Tasks, and many others remained.
That distinction matters.
The claim should be proportional to the evidence.
Microsoft removed one meaningful alternative, not the entire market.
Acquisitions need outcome-based analysis
A lazy version of the Enshittification argument says:
Big company bought smaller company. Therefore bad.
That is not enough.
A better audit asks:
- Did the acquired product remain independently available?
- Were its terms or pricing changed?
- Was its technology folded into the parent company’s product?
- Could users continue using it without migrating?
- Did the acquisition reduce the number of genuinely distinct choices?
Wunderlist answers those questions unusually clearly because the product has a documented acquisition date and a documented end date.
The important event is not the purchase by itself.
It is what happened to the alternative afterward.