Microsoft confirms it has bought 6Wunderkinder, maker of the Wunderlist to-do list app
Welcome 6Wunderkinder! Microsoft acquires Wunderlist — What's better than completing that last important task on your to-do list? Doing so with a beautiful and useful productivity app.
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's confirmation closes out a deal that was already visible in motion: just weeks earlier, Wunderlist had debuted a public API with early integrations for Slack, Sunrise, and HipChat (Wunderlist debuts an API), making the Berlin startup one of the most connected productivity apps on the market. Buying 6Wunderkinder hands Microsoft a proven consumer to-do product plus the team behind it.
The acquisition matters because it slots directly into Microsoft's Office 365 productivity push — and the related coverage shows how the story ends: Wunderlist is eventually absorbed into a successor built in-house, with Microsoft shipping To-Do as an Office 365 preview before retiring the original brand entirely.
First-order effects
- 6Wunderkinder joins Microsoft, bringing Wunderlist's user base and engineering talent under the Office umbrella rather than leaving the app as an independent competitor.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's roadmap shifts from growing Wunderlist to replacing it: the eventual outcome is an in-house To Do redesigned to mimic Wunderlist's feel, a formal shutdown announced for May 2020, and loyal users forced to migrate or defect.
Third-order effects
- The five-year arc from purchase to shuttering — ending with the founder building a new app, Superlist, after Wunderlist finally closed — illustrates the acqui-absorb pattern where big-suite buyers retire standalone brands once their features are folded into a subscription bundle, pushing orphaned users back to independent founders.
The trend: Large software platforms are absorbing beloved standalone productivity apps into subscription suites, trading brand loyalty for ecosystem lock-in while founders spin the pattern into new startups.