In your mind what would have been a smart acquisition? Why do you think the number of players who could "scale" is so small? Up until the O365 apocalypse, there were tons of people operating 100k to 1m user email systems on a few servers with a single digit number of staff (i.e. every university and most big non-tech companies).
As you mention email is super sticky. I can't fathom an argument where OneMedical didn't get them more room for innovation than buying/building a solution to a problem that was solved in 2004.
Yes perhaps there's room to run with OneMedical - we'll see.
Mostly its the Amazon studios budget for blockbusters (i.e. $500M for Lord of the Rings) and the bid for AMC theaters which they fortunately didn't do.
I would think Zoom would have been interesting.
Perhaps there were aspects where customers were running their email, etc. on Amazon servers and thus it'd be better to book the revenue as AWS marketshare or something.
Microsoft sales folks ran around to all the large organizations with on-prem mail systems (both Unix based and Exchange) offering deeply discounted Office licenses and free UNISYS contractors for migrations if the org would commit to moving to paid O365 seats.
Lots of well built and managed systems were tossed out for short term discounts, locking people into a glorified version of Hotmail.
I would have asked mike_d about the "O365 apocalypse" if veqq hadn't. Your link is helpful, but still puzzling. If the onset of Office 365 got rid of tons of staff teams at universities and non-tech big companies, but each team only had a single-digit number of people, can you really call that an apocalypse?
As you mention email is super sticky. I can't fathom an argument where OneMedical didn't get them more room for innovation than buying/building a solution to a problem that was solved in 2004.