I’ve seen this happen far too many times.
Acquired/Acqui-hired
Examples: GeoCities, Posterous, Brace.io, Roon, Viddy, Qwiki, Yahoo! Voices, Blip.tv, Giphy
Situation: Company A buys Company B, employees and all. Together, they will continue their incredible journey to make the world a better place. A few months/years/seconds later, Company B is dead and its employees are either laid off or reassigned to Company A projects.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/A_Million_Ways_to_Die_on_the_Web
why did notion buy it? to shut it down?
They’ve just done the same with a calendar app that I forget the name of. They then rereleased it under their own brand.
They appear to be on an unspoken mission to challenge Google’s suite of apps, so I’d hazard a guess that email tech is a part of that puzzle (along with calendar)
Cron. They didn’t shut it down though, they just suddenly transitioned it. I’d just started using Cron when they did it and it was very unexpected for me.
I mean that sounds pretty reasonable, could they just not think of a name that wasn’t already in prevalent use? Was the goal to be unsearchable for anyone trying to find it?
That’s like creating a reminders app and naming it task manager.
Or a spreadsheet program and calling it Excel.
Or outlook, access…
The name doesn’t matter if you can establish it.
Their point isn’t that it’s a weird name that isn’t descriptive of what the product does, their point is that cron is an already existing bit of software that does something else.
It’d be like if MS made a notes app called Steam, Google called a new camera app iTunes, or Apple rebranded Apple Music to PowerShell.
Minus the trademark infringement I guess. I doubt Cron has that.
Even worse is that it’s close enough.
Like “recur by specific days but not by months cron”
Is a valid search for both things. Only one came out in 1975 and has had that name forever, and one decided it would be cool to hijack it
