TechCrunch just carried the story of an apparently mistakenly published blog post from
Acompli is actually a very interesting company that, like many others at the moment, is looking to reinvent email. Founded by a well regarded trio - JJ Zhuang, Kevin Henrikson and Javier Soltero, Acompli combines file sharing, calendering and email on one mobile application. Acompli can be thought of as an extension to, rather than a disrupter of, email.
Acompli takes a similar approach as Mailbox (acquired by Dropbox) does in this regards - a mobile front end on an existing enterprise email service. The company had picked up $7.3 million in funding earlier this year and was only founded a year ago. As such, an early exit (assuming it has, in fact, occurred) is either an indication that Microsoft wanted them really badly or that Acompli was struggling to find a monetizable route to market.
Given the huge number of other offerings doing similar things, and the firmness with which enterprise IT shops cling to their traditional email tools, I suspect it was the latter.
I suspect that Microsoft PR was trying to get in some last minute pre-Thanksgiving work and had primed this post to drop early next week. An ill-timed mouse click would seem to see Microsoft steal its own thunder.
Neither party wanted to comment on the potential for a deal.