BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Microsoft Leaks Its Own Acquisition Announcement--Is Redmond Scooping Up Email Startup Acompli?

This article is more than 9 years old.

TechCrunch just carried the story of an apparently mistakenly published blog post from Microsoft corporate vice president Rajesh Jha on the Microsoft blog. It seems that Jha, or one of his underlings, clicked "publish" too early and a post announcing Microsoft's acquisition of Email vendor Acompli went out to the wires.

 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.

Follow me on TwitterCheck out my website