So the world’s leading mass mailer (Mailchimp) has been bought by a corporate giant known for making US taxes unnecessarily complicated, in a deal worth $12bn.
Mailchimp has had a huge impact on email by changing mass-mail marketers technology and the expectations of mass-mail recipients (eg everyone). They offer thousands of free emails a month and an easy to use web interface, resulting in millions more businesses getting into email marketing.
Fun fact: the first release of the self-hosted version of phpList, around which my last company was built, occurred the same year that Mailchimp was founded 
How time flies!
DecisionMarketing gives some context about Mailchimp’s current size:
Mailchimp currently caters to more than 13 million users globally, of which 2.4 million are active users. It has around 800,000 paid customers, of which more than 50% are outside the US.
Mailchimp has a database of more than 70 billion contacts, as well as technology integration with more than 250 partners worldwide, which will allow Intuit to cross selling its other products.
BoingBoing reckons this is the end of Mailchimp:
Intuit […] is the ultimate sprawling corporate parasite, despised by every tricked taxpayer, an eyeless life-form lurking in the deepest depths of rent-seeking, regulatory capture and political lobbying.
So long, Mailchimp!
I’ll be happy if the merger results in an opening up of the mass-mailer market to smaller and more diverse competitors, including the few Open Source companies in this field like phpList, OpenEMM, and CiviCRM.
Nice own goal there then. I remember it happening at the time and thought it was a very bold (!) decision. Kind of assumed they’d found a way to keep the old customers on Mailchimp somehow, on a new pricing tier or something. Interesting to hear that wasn’t the case!