[3rd3]

While this app seems polished and well crafted, I find this acquisition surprising. I can see no real innovation here besides combining convenient, known features in one app. Nothing that depends on patents and nothing Microsoft couldn’t build. Am I missing something?

[jtfairbank]

Could be for many reasons:

* The cost of acquisition is less than the cost of developing it themselves. * An aqui-hire. Microsoft wants to pick up the dev talent and skillsets at Accompli. * To prevent a competitor from getting them. Maybe there was other interest that would let a competitor move in on existing Microsoft products. * To continue to build its 'modern' image. There's a lot of additional branding to do if they do it themselves, buying Acompli gives them some nice press and puts the Microsoft brand in front of Acompli's users (which may not be Microsoft's traditional demographic).

[hyp0]

> To prevent a competitor from getting them.

Yes, or becoming a competitor, signalled by having users and getting more. "Strategic" aquisitions often seem absurdly high, unless seen as a threat to the future of the acquirer. You can be a threat without being fundamentally new.

[venomsnake]

That is one problem I have with big exits lately. No one is allowed to grow or develop as independent company.

[hyp0]

True. Modern corps have learnt the lesson of disruption.

I guess the only way it could happen is if it didn't look like a threat until far too late, such as totally different customers (e.g. third world), doing something completely different and no where near as good (e.g. markdown a threat to Word; iOS/android vs Windows)

[bdcravens]

"No one is allowed to grow or develop as independent company."

Of course you are. Just reject the offer. You don't think Uber/AirBnB/Dropbox etc have received offers we've not heard about?

[venomsnake]

Two of those 3 are peripheral to the tech world. They employ tech to disrupt other industries. And dropbox is not disruptive. It competes with similar offerings from the tech giants.

But stuff like Oculus is bought in its infancy - that is not desire to profit, but to control. FB could have acquired 20-30% of the company to provide them with liquidity.

[csmajorfive]

"FB could have acquired 20-30% of the company to provide them with liquidity"

Not really. Most startups don't want to sell that much equity to a potential partner/acquirer unless they have to.

[winter_blue]

> The cost of acquisition is less than the cost of developing it themselves.

Would it really cost over $200 million to clone Acompli?

[nojvek]

$200 million = 200 million users * 1 year * $1. So easy to make a profit with Microsoft's many more millions of customers.

User loyalty is a lot more expensive than lines of code.

[nilkn]

I've used it for a while on my Android phone, and it's not even that polished. It's generally been somewhat buggy. In fact, until a week ago or so, the swipe gestures for archiving/scheduling were horribly broken on Android. The app still crashes sometimes or takes an abnormally long time to refresh after archiving an email.

I still use it because the combination of scheduling/archiving emails and auto-categorizing them as Focused or Other just works really well for my work email. I haven't found another approach to Inbox Zero for my work email that is this simple and effective.

I highly doubt it would cost Microsoft anywhere near $200M to build this themselves. I'm not sure what the motivation behind this purchase is. I'm not really loyal to the product at all, for instance. I'll switch the moment a more polished alternative comes out that has the same features.

[frandroid]

I'm not sure it occupies the same niche, but have you had a look at Google Inbox?

[nilkn]

I love Inbox and use it for my personal email, but my impression was that it can't work with Exchange accounts.