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.<\/b>
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\u2019s 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\u2019s inbox with the swipe of a finger. Outlook\u2019s marquee functionality on mobile was a Focused Inbox that divided a user\u2019s incoming messages by whether or not the app thought they were important \u2014 and it worked shockingly well.
This was a massive divergence from Microsoft\u2019s 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\u2019t clear at the time was that the launch of Outlook mobile presaged massive changes for Microsoft\u2019s 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\u2019s devices. Staying competitive in the email market is important for Microsoft because it\u2019s facing competition from G Suite, with its machine-learning enhanced Inbox offering.
\u201cEmail has continued to be an integral part of business communications even in the days of messaging and social media,\u201d Patrick Moorhead, a principal analyst with Moor Insights and Strategy, said in an email. \u201cMany companies, including Google, are busy making improvements to email with projects like ‚Inbox‘ and it\u2019s important Microsoft stay near the cutting edge of it. They don\u2019t have to lead in it, they just can\u2019t be too far behind.\u201d
Here\u2019s how they got there.
Microsoft wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019 phones that the company didn\u2019t 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.
\u201cThis 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,\u201d Dharmaraj said. \u201cThey did a lot of different moves, and this is just one small aspect of that.\u201d
Scott Stiles, a 26-year Microsoft veteran who has been on the Outlook team for the past five years, said that he didn\u2019t quite understand the importance of acquiring Acompli at first, but said that it has been a boon to the tech titan.
\u201cFrom my perspective at least, it accelerated us by a year or two in terms of really having a competitive Outlook on those other platforms,\u201d he said.
In addition to Acompli, Microsoft went on a spree of acquisitions focused on personal mobile productivity. The company picked up the makers of popular calendar app Sunrise in February 2015, and the company behind task manager Wunderlist in June 2015. Both groups have since been brought into the Outlook organization.
The Acompli team also brought a competitive perspective born from its heritage in the mobile app market. Soltero pointed out that getting users to install a new mobile email app is a high-friction problem, since Apple and Google both ship good clients of their own built into Android and iOS.
He\u2019s working to imbue that same ethos across Outlook and the rest of Microsoft Office, as part of the strategy role he was promoted to in November of last year. Although IT departments, rather than individual users, often make the decision whether or not to adopt Outlook and other apps, Soltero said that \u201cyou can\u2019t use that as an excuse to get lazy.\u201d
Focusing on user experience seems to be working so far. The Outlook mobile app is consistently within the top 100 most downloaded productivity apps in the iOS App Store and Google Play Store worldwide. It often ranks among the top 10 most downloaded productivity apps in markets like the U. S., U. K. and France. Microsoft says that the app has over 40 million active users across iOS and Android.
One of the biggest projects over the past two years has been the unification of five different Outlook teams into a single group with a unified perspective. Stiles said that looking back, it\u2019s possible to think of Microsoft bringing together the Outlook apps as a series of acquisitions, since they were often coming from different teams with different design languages.
\u201cYou have this team [in San Francisco] and elsewhere, the mobile team, that is able to move very quickly and has a very clear sense of direction and not as many expectations, frankly,\u201d Soltero said. \u201cAnd then you have these other teams that have been servicing hundreds of millions of users already, and have different versions and so forth.\u201d
The teams have united under a banner of what they call \u201call-day use,\u201d the idea that users should have an Outlook app available to them, no matter what device they use. The teams have also been working on building features that unify functionality across platforms, while making sure that each app best serves the platform that it\u2019s built for.
\u201cWe\u2019ve really shifted our focus to delivering experiences that sing across all the apps at once,\u201d Stiles said. \u201cWe\u2019ve delivered half a dozen features across all the apps in the span of a couple years, where if you were to rewind a decade before that, you\u2019d see significant inconsistency across the platforms in terms of feature set.\u201d
One of the things Outlook mobile has taught Microsoft is the importance of simplicity and approachability. Stiles said that mobile design sensibilities have been important in helping the company try to rework some of its desktop apps. That work has largely been subtle for the time being, with small additions like the addition of an Archive button that matches the functionality on the Outlook mobile app.
\u201cI think we\u2019ve really benefited from bringing some design talent on board from the mobile space,\u201d Stiles said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s not just Acompli, we\u2019ve got folks from around the company, and from outside the company, who have come in with deep mobile design sensibilities, and we\u2019ve seen those be pretty powerful change agents as we look to modernize and simplify our PC apps.\u201d
Soltero is so committed to ensuring the simplicity of the Outlook experience, he has even excluded one of his beloved features from the app. Acompli had a setting that let users perform different actions on an email address in their mailbox based on how far they swiped it over from one side or another in an inbox.
For example, swiping a message slightly right would archive it, while swiping further would delete it. While Outlook supports swipe-based filing, users can only assign one function to a swipe to the left or the right. While Soltero misses the two-stage swipe, he doesn\u2019t see it returning to Outlook anytime soon.
He said it would be inconsistent of him to argue for the two-stage swipe, a complicated optional behavior, while at the same time pushing for increased simplicity.
The emphasis on user experience extends to the Outlook team\u2019s work with other groups inside Microsoft. For example, the team behind the company\u2019s Enterprise Management Suite and Intune mobile application management software wanted to display a \u201cmanaged by Intune\u201d label inside Outlook. Soltero argued that’s not something users want to or need to know about, even if a company is paying to use mobile app management. The two teams sat down, and the Outlook team talked the Intune team into leaving it out.
Soltero said that while he wants Outlook to fit in well with business IT administrators, he doesn\u2019t want that to hurt users.
As part of the unification project, Stiles said that the Outlook team is working on getting all of its apps running on the same core code, to help accelerate future feature development.
\u201cThat\u2019s going to allow us to innovate faster, to share a ton of technology and a ton of learning in the service,\u201d he said. \u201cArchitecturally, that\u2019s actually a learning that we brought from the mobile application space, and we\u2019re mapping to the desktop applications.\u201d
The team\u2019s focus on building Outlook for all-day use will carry into future feature development for its many apps. Stiles said that users shouldn\u2019t think of one Outlook app as the canonical home of new functionality that other apps will follow.
For example, Microsoft recently announced that Outlook for Mac is getting native support for Office 365 Groups, something that the Windows app had for quite some time. Meanwhile, the desktop apps recently received the mobile apps\u2019 Focused inbox feature.
Stiles said that users should expect the Outlook desktop apps to change over the next 12-18 months as the team works to tweak their designs toward greater simplicity.
\u201cYou\u2019re going to see them be more approachable,\u201d Stiles said. \u201cYou\u2019re going to see them visually be a bit simpler without losing any of the power, but really start taking the approach of honing the application for the core scenarios of that app.\u201d
On the mobile side, Microsoft recently launched support for add-ins, which allow third-party developers to integrate their applications with Outlook, so users can connect content from other systems to their mobile email.<\/p>\n