The tech titan has made a concerted move to change its position in the email market over the past few years, driven by the overall move to mobile. Here’s how it happened.
Two years ago, Microsoft made a massive shift in the way it approached the email market. In January 2015, the company launched Outlook for iOS and Android , free professional-grade email apps for two platforms that Microsoft previously underserved in that regard.
Outlook for iOS and its Android sibling were special, because they supported Gmail, Yahoo and iCloud email, in addition to Microsoft’s Outlook.com, Office 365 and Exchange email offerings. While connecting to third party email providers isn’t new for Outlook, offering one-click support for different email providers at launch sent a message that this wouldn’t be locked to the Microsoft ecosystem.
The apps sported trendy features like the ability to archive messages or schedule them to reappear in a user’s inbox with the swipe of a finger. Outlook’s marquee functionality on mobile was a Focused Inbox that divided a user’s incoming messages by whether or not the app thought they were important — and it worked shockingly well.
This was a massive divergence from Microsoft’s past approach to offering email apps on platforms that competed with Windows. On iOS and Android, the only apps that bore the Outlook name prior to that launch were bare-bones Outlook Web Access clients. What wasn’t clear at the time was that the launch of Outlook mobile presaged massive changes for Microsoft’s whole email group.
Over the past few years, the Outlook team has focused on a new strategy that revolves around creating a cohesive experience that spans a user’s devices. Staying competitive in the email market is important for Microsoft because it’s facing competition from G Suite, with its machine-learning enhanced Inbox offering.
“Email has continued to be an integral part of business communications even in the days of messaging and social media,” Patrick Moorhead, a principal analyst with Moor Insights and Strategy, said in an email. “Many companies, including Google, are busy making improvements to email with projects like ‘Inbox’ and it’s important Microsoft stay near the cutting edge of it. They don’t have to lead in it, they just can’t be too far behind.”
Here’s how they got there.
Microsoft wasn’t starting from scratch with the new Outlook mobile apps. At launch, they were re-skinned versions and slightly modified versions of Acompli, a mobile email app that Microsoft acquired in late 2014. The acquisition was spearheaded by Executive Vice President Qi Lu, who was in charge of Microsoft’s Applications and Services Group.
Bringing Acompli in to launch a version of Outlook that would run on iOS and Android was in line with Microsoft’s overall strategy under CEO Satya Nadella, who rose to the top job slightly less than a year before the deal was done. Rather than abandon mobile operating systems that competed with Windows Phone, he pushed the company to embrace other computing platforms.
In addition to the Acompli app, Microsoft also got the team behind it. Javier Soltero, who was the startup’s CEO, was put in charge of Outlook’s mobile apps following the acquisition. His co-founders, JJ Zhuang and Kevin Henrikson, both veterans of email service Zimbra, took up software architect roles inside Microsoft. Two years on, the three of them are all still at Microsoft, which is a rarity for acquisitions in the tech industry.
Acquiring Acompli gave Microsoft access to new real estate on users’ phones that the company didn’t have a play for previously, as well as a team that could help further its ambitions, according to Satish Dharmaraj, a managing director at Redpoint Ventures. Dharmaraj was instrumental in putting the Acompli team together. He introduced the three men who would go on to be co-founders, and led the only round of fundraising that the company took on.
“This is a team that knows how to disrupt and innovate and be more entrepreneurial, which I think is what Microsoft wanted, as they were looking to turn the corner and find their way back to the top of the innovation chain,” Dharmaraj said.
