Fred Wilson: "Blown away" by Xobni

Corporates don't mind paying money.

Way back when Akamai was starting up, I figured it wouldn't have much of a shelf life, because people would soon start writing cache-friendly pages, and cache servers would make Akamai's core service obsolete.

I still think a cache network would be superior, but Akamai isn't going away any time soon.

Similarly, I think you're in for a surprise as to how slowly change spreads. Corporate environments will likely use Outlook way past its shelf life.

The enterprise market is:

(a) mind-blowingly huge; (b) totally accustomed to paying serious money for software; (c) almost universally dependent on the Microsoft stack for supporting end users, and that means Outlook for optimal integration with Exchange, Active Directory, etc.; (d) totally addicted to e-mail.

Admittedly, it's also (e) resistant to change and chock-full of drones content with maintaining the status quo. Still, if the Xobnis are persistent, if they keep working on this thing, they'll have a gold mine on their hands.

We have a long way to go before we reach Loopt's success. Loopt is making some serious dough. We have a lot of work to do, but it is great to hear from users how much they like what we have built.