I’m not quite sure what to make of these acquisitions. It reminds me of Yahoo’s binge 10 years ago: After del.icio.us, a Directory of Other Things Yahoo! Should Buy. They snagged up a lot of my favourite stuff back then, and Microsoft is doing the same thing with Sunrise etc:
Welcome 6Wunderkinder! Microsoft acquires Wunderlist – The Official Microsoft Blog: “What’s better than completing that last important task on your to-do list? Doing so with a beautiful and useful productivity app. Today, I am thrilled to announce that Microsoft has acquired 6Wunderkinder, the creator of the highly acclaimed to-do list app, Wunderlist.
The addition of Wunderlist to the Microsoft product portfolio fits squarely with our ambition to reinvent productivity for a mobile-first, cloud-first world. Building on momentum for Microsoft Office, OneNote and Skype for Business, as well as the recent Sunrise and Acompli acquisitions, it further demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to delivering market leading mobile apps across the platforms and devices our customers use – for mail, calendaring, messaging, notes and now tasks.”
One Microsoft person told me when I complained about little work had been done on Skype that “we’re listening to users who said ‘don’t fiddle’ with it.” All well and good, but they could have fixed the more ridiculous things, like not being able to disable birthday notifications in some versions of the app, and losing the plot on groups.
Still, this might be a new Microsoft, not the old Microsoft or Yahoo! doing these new acquisitions. They’ve done a lovely job integrating Acompli. So maybe there’s hope. I don’t mind these things getting that kind of treatment so long as they do it to reach out to users, rather than to fence them in. That’s going to take quite a change of attitude up in Redmond.