Outlook.com preview gets new add-ins from Uber, PayPal, Evernote, and Boomerang as rollout expands
Office Blogs :
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands four months after Microsoft used Build 2015 to lay out its plan to turn Office into a platform, promising apps and add-ins for Outlook.com rather than keeping the client closed. Today's update is the first tangible payoff: Uber, PayPal, Evernote, and Boomerang add-ins shipping inside the Outlook.com preview, with the rollout widening to more users.
The significance is distribution: each partner gets a presence inside Microsoft's webmail base without building a standalone app, and the corpus shows the pattern sticking — add-ins reached Outlook on iOS by early 2017, followed by LinkedIn contact enrichment and eventually Microsoft Pay moving payments natively into the inbox.
First-order effects
- Outlook.com preview users can now book rides, pay, save notes, and schedule follow-ups without leaving their inbox; Uber, PayPal, Evernote, and Boomerang gain direct access to Microsoft's mail audience at zero client-development cost.
Second-order effects
- Other consumer-webmail players face pressure to open equivalent extension APIs of their own or concede the inbox-action layer to Microsoft, while developers choosing one mail platform now have a concrete reason to prioritize Outlook.
Third-order effects
- If the sequence holds — third-party add-ins, then LinkedIn data, then Microsoft's own Microsoft Pay replacing partner payment flows — the inbox consolidates into Microsoft's service hub, with partners initially supplying functionality Microsoft may later internalize.
The trend: Email clients are being rebuilt as extensible platforms where third-party services plug into the inbox, turning webmail from a reading surface into a transaction and action layer.