I tend to agree. It was worth having a go at buying the company, but now they've been rebuffed their next best option is simply to clone the interesting bits in house.<p>It'll take them six months to produce a reasonable facsimile , but then they probably don't have another feature release planned for that amount of time anyway.<p>Personally, I think the Xobni guys are fools for refusing the offer. If Microsoft are interested in acquiring the technology, then they're almost certainly going to become a competitor now the offer is refused. They could do far worse than selling out for 20 odd million in cash and stock, spending a couple of years working for Microsoft while their stock vests and then going on to the next big thing. Instead they've got themselves an uphill battle in which they are running very barely ahead of a corporate juggernaut.<p>Well whatever happens, it should be entertaining.
Dear All, as the originator of the blog post that has sparked this thread may I begin by apologising for my sloppy spelling errors on the post, which I've corrected and thanks for highlighting them. However, to correct some of the misunderstandings and prejudices of other contributors to this thread<p>- I was testing the add-in using BUSINESS email and sadly have too many attachments on incoming emails from people who don't use online collaboration services.<p>- I've never tended to use an email inbox to store documents, preferring windows file folders instead. Hence the attachments get saved off on receipt. Personally I always found Outlook quite flaky as a file storage system and would also hate to rely on remembering who sent which document.<p>- I had to test Xobni on a family desktop as I've migrated away from Outlook for all my work activities and Xobni only works in Outlook. Why pay licence fees when you can use identical services online for free and access them from anywhere? Hence, I simply downloaded business emails onto the home machine to test over a couple of weeks.<p>- Google desktop search is what I use to find anything on a PC, albeit most of my docs get stored in the "cloud" these days. Hence, Xobni "search", which is restricted to Outlook content, was superfluous.<p>- As for the photo comments, sadly it's the face I was born with and the photo was taken by Ian Forrestor of BBC Backstage fame at the London BBC Backstage & Geek party in 2006. That my opinion is diminished coz you don't like my picture...........wow, tough crowd<p>- Oddly enough, I was writing as a past Xobni user and of my experience of the product - my comments had nothing to do with being an investor.<p>- I'm delighted that some people could derive use from this product. Evidently we have considerably different needs or have settled on alternate solutions.
I didn't care about social aspect at all, there were two absolutely crucial features in Xobni that I absolutely loved:<p>1. Ability to instantly see all attachments sent by a given person.<p>2. Outlook's own search is unusable, I never mastered it, Xobni was a godsend.<p>Take any product: some people like it and some won't. I liked Xobni and this guy didn't. God knows why, perhaps he didn't have enough attachments or didn't bother to search anything because of his phenomenal memory or something :)))
I can just feel the angst and envy in this thread. Despite being a silly product, they still worked very hard on it and built up enough spin and hype to get it to that point. It brings up the argument that a startup can do any kind of shenanigans as their business, but with hard work, resourcefulness, determination, and perseverance, they can still be successful. Go read their blog from years ago when it was just a couple of guys driving out to the valley, all the way up till now with seven digit offers coming in.<p>Xobni will make off like bandits despite how "worthless" the product is. The next offer will be for way more than the original $20 million. I wish them the best of luck.
Here's an example of how the context-freeness of the web can work against you. I've never seen this guy's blog before. The headline was just interesting enough to get above my click threshold. But when I got to the post, all I noticed was how badly written it is:<p><i>perhaps it was quickly than trying to replicate</i><p><i>some Microsoft underlying thinks that they will make the old boss happy</i><p>If I knew the writer to be a frequent source of good insights, this wouldn't have much effect. But I don't, so it does.
So, someone that doesn't usually use Outlook doesn't like Xobni's Outlook plug-in? How is this newsworthy?<p>Many of the things he said he never did in Outlook were things I did when I used Outlook four dozen times a day. He could have saved time by writing "I am not in the target audience" and been done with it.
The only person I can think of who is a level above anybody else is Patrick Collison. Everyone else is just in the game, and that's the most important thing. It's easy to think, why the hell did a startup get funded? However, VC's have to invest--it's their job--because the money will be lost due to inflation. And they can't invest in one company, they have to diversify. So if a group of young people with a revenge of the nerds attitude and no other commitments are willing to move to California and work harder than anybody else, and in the software field, no less, then what other choice do VC's have than to invest?<p>Young people (less commitments, more optimism) make up a small portion of the population. Good programmers make up a small portion as well. Those willing to relocate (California), also. Those who are willing to dedicate themselves to doing a startup for multiple years, tiny. So when you find an individual who has all of these qualities, and as part of a bigger group, you're now talking a very tiny, tiny portion of the country. And VC's have no choice but to invest in you.
I have not used Xobni myself, but I think if I have implemented a plug in for Outlook, offered $20M by Microsoft for it, I will take the money and run as fast as I can.
Outlook is a Microsoft product, they have unlimited resources, they understand Outlook itself better than anyone outside. Hey this guys can replicate the plug in really fast time trust me.
I’m a consultant and done stuff for them I know some of the people there; a bunch of really smarts hackers.
What relationships does Xobni uncover? How does it do it?<p>I was thinking to make a web app where people could upload their cell phone records and it would find relationships, but I'm not sure what to look for exactly. Any ideas?