Xobni - a waste of money
greatapps.blogspot.com
Gee, and people wonder why UK startups hate the VCs over there.
greatapps.blogspot.com
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.
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.
Well whatever happens, it should be entertaining.
(I can't believe they turned down the offer!)
You can't say it was foolish unless you know everything--payment schedule (cash/stock/milestones), ambition of founders, post-acquisition employment requirements, future direction of the product.
I think I'll get another opinion about that from someone at Netscape, Lotus, or Corel.
Oh, never mind.
You don't think there's any particular systemtic reason why Apple shipped like 5 releases of OS X in the time it took to create Vista?
But I can think of 34 billion reasons why I wouldn't want to be in their crosshairs. And those are 2008 Benjamins.
Unrelated: I've been womdering for a while where you are from with that name? Can you tell us?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- I'm delighted that some people could derive use from this product. Evidently we have considerably different needs or have settled on alternate solutions.
For the most part though, we primarily value respectful rational discussion and I apologize again for catching some of us on a bad day.
One of the things I noticed at Startup School was that people were so busy talking about substance (hacking, business, etc.), that there was little time for fluff.
In any large group there are outliers. You found a few.
OTOH, I noticed you referred to us as "groupies" on your blog, but omitted that sentence in this reply. I'm guessing you knew it would be inflammatory here.
Nerds. Geeks. Weirdos. Bipolar obsessive compulsive basket cases. Fine.
But groupies? (Throws pocket protector at pg on stage.)
1. Ability to instantly see all attachments sent by a given person.
2. Outlook's own search is unusable, I never mastered it, Xobni was a godsend.
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 :)))
Unfortunately, I saw the attachment lookup as the only thing useful.
In my opinion, they honed in on a huge problem of email search and solved it really well.
Admittedly, not all of the features of Xobni are very useful, but I think the user interface (keeping the search history), super-fast email search, and phone number extraction are all useful features.
They also did a good job of picking colors to make it look different from Outlook because people who walk by my desk always seem to catch the bright colors and ask me "what is that?!"
I used it for a few days and removed it later because it provided no real value, except for my coworkers asking me what I had there in outlook. I don't need a person ranking or the amount of emails sent by that person at a certain timespan. I just want to organize my email.
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.
You could be right. But when I saw that "20 million" I could hardly believe it. If I was a MSFT exec, I'd simply say, "we'll give you 1.5 million (or whatever), take it or leave it." If they left it, I'd have a couple interns replicate the thing.
perhaps it was quickly than trying to replicate
some Microsoft underlying thinks that they will make the old boss happy
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.
Personally I don't need or use Xobni, so I can't comment. And anyway, I probably make a lot of spelling mistakes, too, because English is only my second language. So feel free to ignore my comments.
You said it. Doing so is grounds for ruthless downmodding on here.
PG said there are 30 editors now. People are getting accounts marked dead at the drop of a hat, if they don't drink the kool-aid.
That's false, as anyone can see by looking at the dead comments and submissions. There have always been people on here criticizing YC and YC-funded startups. And there have always been about 30 editors, for that matter.
And so there should be. Disagreeing on merits, and doing so in a good tone makes interesting conversation and broadens everyones minds. There's a lot of great disagreeing on YC news.
Or have a lightsaber dual with pg, I would leave the choice to him. I warn you I would be wearing spandex during the latter though.
Incidentally, I think I was (probably) wrong then. I'm still waiting to see how it turns out, but their subsequent releases have been much, much more impressive than I expected them to be.
I didn't even use Outlook way back in the day when I was employed by a Fortune 500 that forced everyone to use it. I remember once someone mentioning to my manager that I hadn't completed my Outlook training and everyone in our group had a good laugh.
We aren't quite the target audience generally speaking.
It's interesting that you brought up not being a native speaker. That is a piece of context I instinctively scan for, because if I get it wrong my judgment will be off. In this case, the title ("a UK VC") and the fellow's name made me expect the Queen's English and, now that I think of it, probably raised the standard I unconsciously applied.
One can make errors about this. I knew an American who had mastered Russian to such an extent that Russians thought he was Russian. This backfired. Inevitably, he would put things in a way that a real Russian never would. Not realizing he was a brilliant student of their language, native speakers concluded that he was an illiterate Russian. That's something Russians care about a lot, so he got badly treated.
As for your comments, I don't ignore them; I'm familiar enough with your user name that I must have read many of them, though I don't remember anything specific. I bet that if I had been asked, I would have identified you as an intelligent non-native-English speaker, and if I noticed any spelling mistakes I doubt they mattered.
Of course judging by the presentation in general is perfectly valid and natural. Otherwise there would be no web design.
On a post to a forum like this, of course not.
But not even running your own blog post through a spell or grammar checker?
Unakseptibal!
hominen makes this hilariously recursive.
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.
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.
> perhaps at Open Coffee, and maybe we can compare our
> respective CVs.
The CV of the commentator is irrelevant. He's not claiming to be more experienced/well known than you; he is claiming that you are not a well known UK VC.
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?
Seriously though. This is just like what Facebook tried to do with the purchase history thing last fall. It didn't go over too well. There's good reason that some things should never be made public.
The problem I see with the social networks is that in order for them to capture any truely valuable relationship data they have to tread on First Amendment rights. Google can luckily stay in the annonymous territory and reap the rewards. The social networks aren't going to be as lucky.