Microsoft has purchased email startup Acompli, Ina Fried reports for Re/code.
“There may not be much surprise in this one thanks to an errant blog post, but Microsoft’s purchase of Acompli shows that the company is serious about supporting mobile operating systems beyond its own,” Fried reports. “That is underscored by the amount Microsoft is paying, which we are hearing is north of $200 million.”
Fried reports, “Acompli, an iOS and Android email client, has been praised for being a great way to connect to Microsoft’s email servers as well as to Google’s mail service.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Microsoft’s blog post by Rajesh Jha, Corporate Vice President, Outlook and Office 365, announcing the deal, verbatim:
I’m pleased to announce that Microsoft has acquired Acompli, provider of innovative mobile email apps for iOS and Android.
This acquisition is part of our company-wide effort to help people accomplish more with their mobile devices. This year we brought Office to the iPad and the iPhone, and we recently announced that we’re bringing Office to Android devices. These are significant steps in our work to deliver the best productivity experiences across mobile platforms, and we’re continuing to push forward.
In a world where more than half of email messages are first read on a mobile device, it’s essential to give people fantastic email experiences wherever they go. The Acompli team is passionate about this quest. Their app provides innovative ways to focus on what’s important in your inbox, to schedule meetings, and work with attachments and files. Users love how it connects to all email services and provides a single place to manage email with a focus on getting things done. It consistently receives enthusiastic feedback from users and strong app store ratings. Reviews have called it “your new best friend,” “brilliant” and “must have for BYOD.”
We’re excited about what’s possible as we build on the app’s success and bring it together with work currently in progress by the Outlook team. Our goal is to deliver fantastic cross-platform apps that support the variety of email services people use today and help them accomplish more.
This acquisition brings us an app with innovative technology and a set of talented people who are passionate about reinventing email and communications on mobile screens. It will expedite our work to deliver the full power of Office to mobile devices. Stay tuned for more details in the coming months. You can also read a blog post by Acompli CEO Javier Soltero here.
Thanks,
Rajesh
Every time I see some app startup company sell for this crazy amount of money I’m like “damn, I should have done that.” Seriously, though, they don’t think they could build a decent app of their own for $200 million?
Good question. The good answer is, “Not with their stultifying, Mexican-firing squad bureaucracy and gormless “leadership.” Microsoft has vastly outspent Apple in R&D over the past 15 years, and look how little they have to show for it. It has always been vastly more cost-effective and effective to Microsoft to purchase from without than develop from within, which is why any Microsoft product you can think of was actually acquired.
I say this as someone who was stupid enough to buy shares of Microsoft in the late 90s. Feh.
I think Word and Excel are the only two apps Microsoft developed in-house. Powerpoint and Internet Explorer were acquired.
MS Excel (originally Multiplan and developed on Macs) was a ripoff of Lotus 1-2-3 which itself was a ripoff of VisiCalc. MS Word was to take on Word Perfect, even using part of the name. It’s a big stretch to say MS “developed” anything other than an extremely effective predatory marketing strategy leveraged on their monopoly desktop position.
VisiCalc…I used that program back around 1980.
Add Skype which they also bought and ruined the user interface😖👎
Fun, semi-relevant fact:
Microsofts Halo franchise was originally intended for the Macintosh. In fact, they had a working prototype demo of Halo for the Macintosh before Microsoft bought them out and had them rebuild the entire game for the Xbox.
The company that was making Halo, Bungie, even did an amazing demo of Halo back when Steve Jobs had recently come back to Apple. Bungie did some amazing work, creating Marathon and Myth. Those were a lot of fun! Many people were really upset when Microsoft bought them and locked them into Xbox-first development.
I reckon they can ruin one for that money though, as we will no doubt discover yet again.
200mil is a rounding error compared to their 90 billion in cash in balance sheet
True but still doesn’t mean they should spend foolishly.
I don’t know much about Acompli, but sounds like it is a great email client. However, when MS merges it with Outlook, that will be the end of this great email client.
I bet the Acompli owners are laughing all the way to the bank.
$200 million? So when are security guards at MS going to get more benefits? What is that you say? The MS guards keep Apple products OUT and people IN?!
/s
Good to see MS getting back to Bill Gates’ original intent of being simply a developer for Apple’s platform!
And an acquirer of everything else.
Sounds like another great app that will die on the vine @Microsucks
Microsoft is about to post the biggest tech loss in history. And $200 million could have paid for the next round of massive layoffs. It’s poor financial planning like this that just adds to their already world renown beleaguered status.
Embrace
Enfold
Extinguish
Hey, they have to change with the times …