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Today Microsoft released new Outlook apps for iOS and Android, which is both the culmination of several years’ of work and the first step in a greater journey to bring a true Outlook email experience to every mobile platform.
With roots back to the mid-1960s, email has been part of the fabric of the Internet since the beginning. Its foundation of open standards means that a message sent from an iPhone today can still be theoretically read on a Commodore 64. It is one of the most open, available communications technologies on Earth.
That fact goes a long way toward explaining why, even with such a long history, email has never lost relevance. Despite claims in the industry about its imminent demise—email usage is going up, not down. Last year there were 1.1 billion email subscribers and according to the analyst firm Radicati that number should double by 2018. In the business world, email will always have a critical role in facilitating productivity—as an asynchronous communication queue—and a repository of knowledge and information.
That doesn’t mean email is perfect. Today the average business user sends and receives 121 emails per day, but more email doesn’t mean more productivity. We need to be able to send better, more useful email, more easily. In a mobile world, email on your phone needs to be more than just for reading messages while standing in line for coffee.
We founded Acompli with this mission in mind—building the future of mobile email. We’ve learned that users spend an average of 24 seconds inside our app every time they open it—and that happens dozens of times per day. Our goal has been to make those 24 seconds as productive as they can be.
Today that mission continues with the launch of Outlook for iOS and Android. We’ve developed apps that put your mobile email in focus, integrate with your calendar and make attachments much easier to use on the go. Joining forces with Microsoft also gives us the ability to reach over a billion Office users and do much more with the technology, with tighter integration with Office and Outlook, the most popular desktop email app on the planet.
In our early discussions with Microsoft, we realized that the closer we could work together, the more value we can deliver over the course of those 24 seconds. There is extraordinary power and untapped potential across all of the Office 365 technologies—and we think an extremely compelling and beautiful email app will provide one effective portal to tap into it.
Since the acquisition, we’ve been working hard on integrating our teams and development processes to ensure we’re able to continue rapidly delivering new features and functionality to our customers.
There’s an amazing transformation going on at Microsoft, where energy and optimism and drive for change permeate the company. Our mission is to bring the best mobile email experience across platforms, in a way that is as familiar and functional as Outlook itself. It’s an exciting time for us—and hopefully you think so too.
To learn about the apps, check out this post, and if you want to help us build the best mobile solution for email, go download the Outlook apps in the iOS App Store and Google Play today and let us know what you think.
Source: http://blogs.office.com/2015/01/29/future-mobile-email-much-can-accomplish-24-seconds/
