[jillesvangurp]

For the same reason that Skiff is being acquihired: it has simply proven to not be a viable business.

The reason Notion acquires and kills this product is not because it is in any way an interesting product or company to them but because it has investors that need bailing out that are also Notion investors. Notion gets some nice people in their team and some of them might even stay.

This is a very common practice in silicon valley. VC funded companies fail all the time. Instead of letting them go bankrupt, investors and founders swap shares and walk away with an "exit" in their pocket. Everybody wins.

[dcow]

I know how shitty exits work, trust me. I don’t know why Notion wouldn’t want to tack on email to their product suite. email may not work in isolation in exactly the way Skiff was doing it, but it’s not expensive to operate and it does work as a part of suite of business productivity tooling.

The only thing I can come up with is that the tech doesn't drop in as is because of the encryption so if they have to rebuild it under Notion’s brand do a clean cut and reboot targeting Notion’s market.

[turminal]

Except for the users.

[ploum]

That’s the essence of consumerism, isn’t it? "how to milk out users as much as we can" (with variation around "milk gently lot of users" or "milk hard a few addicted junkies", with everyone dreaming of being Apple "milk really hard a lot of addicted junkies")