Donna

» see don.na as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On 30 January 2014 Yahoo bought the company that made Donna. Four weeks later the app stopped working, which had been the plan from the moment the papers were signed. The press called it an acqui-hire and nobody pretended otherwise: four of the five people went to Yahoo's communications group to work on Yahoo Mail, and the product they had spent two years on was pulled from the App Store.

Donna was an iPhone assistant, released on 27 June 2013 by Incredible Labs of San Francisco. She read your calendar, watched where you were, and worked out the one thing a calendar app of that era would not tell you: when to actually get up and leave. The notification arrived with the travel time from wherever you actually were, plus the dial-in number if the meeting turned out to be a phone call. Version 2.0, in November 2013, added the ability to email everyone waiting for you and say you were running late.

She was named after Donna Moss from The West Wing, the assistant to the deputy chief of staff, and the company referred to the app as "her" without embarrassment. Incredible Labs had raised $2.5 million in seed money from a list that ran from Khosla Ventures to Ashton Kutcher. The domain was don.na, a Namibian country code bent into a first name.

This was an iPhone-only product in a year when I was on Android, in a city where the problem it solved barely existed. Ankara traffic is bad enough that no app is going to tell you when to leave with a straight face. The predictive-assistant race of 2013 happened almost entirely on American carriers and American commutes.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

2013 was the year every mobile startup tried to build the thing that Google Now had just demonstrated was possible. The premise was that your phone already knew your schedule and your location, so it should stop waiting to be asked. Donna was one of the better executions, and the reviews treated her as a replacement for the calendar app rather than as a novelty.

The economics underneath were never visible. Donna was free, had no subscription, and sat on top of calendar data that Apple and Google both owned natively. Everyone building in this category was effectively betting that a platform owner would buy them before a platform owner shipped the feature.

~ the acqui-hire ~

Marissa Mayer's Yahoo made something like thirty of these purchases, and the pattern rarely varied: buy a small mobile team, then close the product and move the engineers onto Yahoo's own apps. Ptch and Vizify went the same way in the same stretch. The team was the asset here, not the software, and Yahoo said so openly enough that the coverage on day one already carried the words "will be shut down" in the headline.

Co-founder Kevin Cheng had been a product lead at Twitter before this. Of the founders, Scott San Filippo did not make the move to Sunnyvale. The rest arrived at a company that was, at that moment, rebuilding Yahoo Mail for the fourth or fifth time.

~ the farewell email ~

The shutdown notice went out in Donna's own voice, which is why it is the part people still quote. TechCrunch printed it in full on 27 February 2014:

"As you may have heard, my team is soon headed off to Yahoo to start a new chapter. I've decided it's time for me to move on to new adventures as well. Tomorrow, Friday February 28th, I'll be retiring as an assistant, so I won't be sending you notifications to remind you when to leave anymore. I will be permanently deleting your account information, as well as all calendar data you shared with me."

Published registers mostly file Donna's death as 27 February, which is the date of the article rather than the date in the letter. The letter says Friday the 28th, and 28 February 2014 was a Friday. The archived copies of don.na agree: the homepage is captured at its full size on 30 January, the day of the Yahoo announcement, and has collapsed to less than half that size by the afternoon of 28 February. She signed off on time.

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