14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Outlook is currently one of the best (if not the best) email app on Android and iOS, but this was only possible after the company acquired Acompli in 2014.
The deal also included the startup’s email application, which at that point was very popular in mobile app stores, with Microsoft later rebranding it as Outlook and improving it with more features and Microsoft app integration.
As part of the partnership, Javier Soltero, who was the Acompli CEO, joined the Redmond-based software giant to be in charge of the Outlook push on mobile devices before eventually becoming the chief of everything Outlook within the company. Earlier this year, he was appointed strategy boss for Microsoft Office.
As part of the transition from Acompli to Microsoft, Soltero tried to change Redmond’s email culture, and part of this plan was to tell the firm’s employees what they were doing wrong.
In an interview with WSJ, Soltero explains that the first thing he did was a presentation in January 2015 when he told Microsoft’s employees that they needed to do better because the email world was changing and the firm had to adapt to the new trends.
“We can’t be the new Lotus Notes”
“Nobody was lamenting the absence of Outlook on the iPhone or on Android prior to us delivering that product,” he recalls saying to hundreds of employees who attended his presentation and to thousands of others watching online. “There was a deafening silence in the room.”
Soltero went on to explain that Microsoft employees needed to adopt a different approach, explaining that unless they do that, they can become the new Lotus Notes, an email solution that was once very popular but which went dark because of the lack of improvements.
“The opportunity is huge and really ours to lose. If we continue on our current course and speed, we will become this,” he continued, pointing to a slide showing the logo of Lotus Notes.
Employees, however, didn’t agree with him, so they started sending him hate mail and accusing their new boss of “disrespecting the legacy of the company.”
“I think the suggestion that we weren’t winning was a painful one for them to hear,” Soltero explains.
Unfortunately, this didn’t end up very well for Microsoft workers who didn’t agree with their new boss. The Acompli founder says sending him hate mail was a method of “self-selecting” them out of the Outlook group, so many simply left the team because they couldn’t be part of a unit that shared a different culture.