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Comment by amatriain | Hacker News Reader

Is this Xobni really comparable to Dropbox? I mean, I hadn't heard of Xobni until just now.

I don't know what xobni's advertising was like in other cities, but I was very surprised with the amount of advertising they had here in Seattle. Just a few weeks ago, when Microsoft released Office 2010, Xobni had this gigantic advertising campaign. I don't think I've ever seen so much advertising for a simple app.

Advertising I saw: Tons of teens dancing with Xobni signs around the edges of the Microsoft campus. Planes circling Seattle, with signs trailing behind them. Radio ads. Bus ads. TV commercials. Tons of shit plastering Bellevue.

It was impressive to say the least. I'm probably one of the most difficult consumers to advertise to, and I nearly wanted to try the product after seeing that advertisement campaign.

Anyways, nothing for me to say about the product, just the advertising.

That's just you ;-)

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/202911.asp

They seem to be courting Redmond.

We are courting msft employees to use Xobni again. At one point we had 16k msft employees using Xobni. Then they started beta testing Outlook 2010 internally and we weren't compatible, so we lost all but 1,000. Our seattle campaign was designed to let them all know we are now compatible with Outlook 2010. When MSFT buys a Xobni Enterprise license for their employees, they will easily pay back the cost of our advertising campaign :)

And despite some media theories, No we didn't do this to get MSFT to acquire us.

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