Why did they acquire the startups providing productivity tools?
Tech giants accelerate acquisition of startups that develop productivity tools:
- Salesforce buys word processing app Quip for $750M
- Microsoft Purchase Of Wunderlist Confirmed
- Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M
Why did they acquire these startups even though they have similar tools? The new services have three common features that can attract them.
Collaboration
Many business persons still use e-mail. Where is the latest version of the document? When did you share your task status? They waste time and energy to find proper information. New productivity tools solve these problems. Quip acquired by Salesforce is just such a service.
Your team members can grasp new information immediately after you update documents that show risk, progress, transaction and so on. You can also bring real-time Saleforce data to documents now. Tech giants already provide tools for individuals and expand the capability of them by collaboration.
UI
UI is the most important factor that users determine a product (That’s why I post many articles about design!). Old companies have too many users to change an interface of their services. For instance, a lot of people will be confused if Outlook view is suddenly changed. Wunderlist broke one of the deadlock.
The UI is simple and beautiful. You can set to-dos quite easily with due date, reminders, etc. The same holds for the mobile app. We use this kind of tools every day, every time. Therefore, UI is foundation of competitive advantage and value for acquisition.
Focus
Generally speaking, startups focus on one solution because their resource is limited. A new function increases costs of development, maintenance, and customer support. The most important point is that users lose the sight of the feature if they can do a lot of things. Too many functions might make the tool less distinguished.
JIRA, project management tool provided by Atlassian, is powerful. Software engineers prefer to use the service that suits their needs. However, some people might be puzzled by the first selection screen that you need to determine “Scrum” or “Kanban”. Trello specializes in Kanban board and it is easy-to-use for non-engineers. Their markets are complementary.
