Microsoft is digging its roots deeper into iOS and Android this week with the announcement that it has acquired the popular cross-platform email app Acompli.
News of the Acompli acquisition was posted today on Microsoft’s company blog, with VP of Office, Rajesh Jha, saying the company plans to integrate the app into the Outlook redesign his team is currently working on.
“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.”
The Acompli acquisition will reportedly cost Microsoft around $200 million, but the company’s existing app for iOS and Android isn’t going anywhere. Accounts will continue to work and Acompli CEO Javier Soletero promises that new functionality and improvements will still be released every few weeks.
Accompli is a free email app that works on both iPhone, iPad and Android, with support for Hotmail, Office 365, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo and other email services. It’s unique feature set allows treats email more like task management, with the ability to schedule meetings, edit your calendar, and keeps your most important emails at the top.
Microsoft hasn’t detailed exactly what it plans to do with its new powerhouse email app yet, but Acompli says it will announce more product plans in the coming months.
Source: Acompli
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
One response to “Microsoft raids App Store for popular cross-platform email app”
One of those apps (Accompli)…I just downloaded by suggestion from CoM;) lol, months ago…
I actually had to ‘open’ it several weeks later to figure out what it was!
It’s an excellent cross platform mail manager for iOS & Android (we use both for business and personal reasons) and M/S has been up some very cool stuff with iOS in this past year as 365 is incredible. @ $9.99 for a family …five licenses, five terabytes of storage, one for each user. Collaboration with those cloud files and the entire suite! It’s like DropBox with a powerful (the most) text editing program in the world, easily the best spreadsheet software and a decent presentation app too;). I’m not a huge PowerPoint fan but it’s ubiquitous so reading it in its own native format is a boon
One Note KicKA A$$$!
OneDrive…as we’ve discussed it’s unbelievable. 5TB of storage for the family, integration with iOS to upload files, docs, presentations and spreadsheets, photos videos and music. I’m impressed with MS since Ballmer’s departure. So much so I bought my first .windows machine in almost ten years. I’m one of nine folks in the world I think that digs 8.1 (Windows;))—& it’s new paradigm using touch and mouse/stylus input.
MS’s HiDPI display and scaling technology isn’t nearly up to ‘par’ as OS X …nor are their trackpads, but the GUI and ‘speed’ of the OS itself — much like OS X ‘gets outta the way’ when it’s time to use software. Or anything outside of the desktop/metro/pin board/ whatever they call the first little touch deal with tiles. By default the lower left is the desktop that ‘looks’ like 7, Vista, XP, NT 2000, ’95&’98. RtClk TGE lower left and the ‘Start’ button pops like the old days. After launch though (especially with SSD for storage), every Adobe CC app I’ve got runs well and without lag on a core i5/8GB RAM & a 256GB SSD. 13″ 2 in 1 so I’ve got a core i5 tablet when I need to run down the haul, take my work to lunch or just play a game on
Hopefully these buyouts MS is doing continue to refine and reinvent the apps with continued improvement otherwise not possible by a small vendor without the MS MasterCard;)
It’s Microsoft after all, and where they made their duckets. Software. My first computer was the IIe and I played MS Flight Simulator on it. That was long before ‘Windows’ as an OS …because we were all using DOS, storing data on 5 ¼ or 3 ½” ‘floppies’
There wasn’t an HDD inside there to store your games, apps and software. Perhaps somewhat like Jobs returning to Apple after Scully
Kill em all. Concentrate on few. MS seems to have the Xbox, Surface/mobile phone, Office, & Windows. They’re latest surface, thanks to Haswell has been a hit, albeit an expensive one if you want to update internals to a useful machine
Time will indeed tell with Xbox versus PS1 but MS’s …like Apple’s system allows both vertical and horizontal integration and aggregation with its own Eco system. Something Android is sorely missing with the Chromebook being your answer to working counterpart in the office or home. As well as carrier bloat, where iOS and Win mobile have truly working systems to edit video, manipulate particle physics and forecasting, CAD or photography editing, the list goes on forever.
I see Windows picking up steam in the mobile sector as Android (Samsung) loses. Arlen share simply because of these principles.
What a great time to be a 44 year old geek!