BERLIN: Wunderlist chief design officer Bendikt Lehnert was understandably quiet about the fact that his company was in talks to be bought by Microsoft for $100-200 million when I met him in Berlin at the company’s Alexanderplatz HQ two weeks ago. He was showing a pitch deck to about 20 tech journalists and didn’t want to derail those talks by discussing the deal prematurely.
But he did drop a few interesting clues about what Microsoft will get from Wunderlist. The most interest part of is that Microsoft will get a new view inside Apple’s App Store (and inside Slack, the work chatroom tool that is slowly replacing over office email).
Wunderlist has a good working relationship with Apple, Lehnert told us. Wunderlist was Apple’s App of the Year in 2013, and “We were one of the first to launch on Apple Watch,” Lehnert said. Wunderlist — with its various notifications — is “one of the few apps that actually makes sense on the device.”
The company also prides itself on being “first to develop for each new iOS.” It has also adopted Apple’s simple, “beautiful” and highly focused design philosophy.
When Apple got a big wireless carrier deal in China and iPhone sales took off there, that almost instantly made China into a huge market for Wunderlist. “China became our second biggest market within a few months of launching there,” he said.
