Microsoft launches short-form email app Send for iPhone that works like instant messaging, coming later to Android and Windows Phone
Introducing Send—designed for in-and-out email — Sometimes you just need to send a quick, short note to your co-worker.
Context & Ripple Effects
Send is the second piece of a small 2015 experiment at Microsoft in unbundling email into single-purpose mobile apps: two months earlier, ZDNet spotted the company building a lightweight email client codenamed Flow, and now Send ships that idea to iPhones — short notes that behave like instant messages rather than inbox threads.
The same playbook continued within weeks, with Invite for meeting scheduling landing on iOS in September alongside Who's In for iMessage — a cluster of micro-apps testing which slices of office communication users want pulled out of the full inbox.
First-order effects
- iPhone users get an in-and-out messaging-style way to reach coworkers without opening Outlook, and Microsoft gains a live testbed for whether chat-like email drives daily engagement on mobile.
Second-order effects
- The rapid follow-up — Send reaching Android and new markets by mid-September — shows Microsoft treating these apps as portfolio bets rather than one-offs, forcing rivals' mobile productivity suites to consider unbundled entry points of their own.
Third-order effects
- The arc from standalone experiments to consolidation is already visible in the corpus: by 2017 Outlook itself absorbed quick-reply-style interaction (quick reply in the redesigned Outlook), and by 2019 Microsoft folded Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into one mobile Office app — suggesting these micro-apps were probes whose surviving features get folded back into the flagship suite.
The trend: Microsoft's 2015 run of single-purpose communication apps marks an early step toward messaging-first, conversation-style work interfaces that later get consolidated back into flagship suites like Outlook and Office.