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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

The thing about Xobni is that as much as I like it (having been doing interesting things with email for a very long time) and I think they are right to focus on Outlook (since it sux0r), I can't help thinking that Xobni is a _feature_ and not a company.

Perhaps the Xobni guys can talk about what makes them think that it's a stand alone company? Perhaps the answer is that they don't, perhaps they just hope Microsoft will buy them.

John.

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Having met one of Xobni's co-founders recently and hearing more about Xobni's vision, I can tell you that they are not just planning to be a plug in for Outlook. Xobni Insight is a plug in for Outlook, but it is just a starting point for the company. They do want to expand into Yahoo and Gmail clients, various instant messenger clients and who knows what else to help organize your personal information. Give them some more time and I'm sure you'll be seeing more offerings before long.

jsb got it right. Our goal is to organize your personal information centered around relationships and communication. Think of all the places where people communicate with you (web, IM, social networks); we want to organize that data.

Present day Xobni is already more than a plugin to Outlook. We keep our own store of all of Outlook's email data and our UI doesn't use the Outlook plugin architecture (it is very limited). What does this mean? .... it means you can point Xobni at any email data store and display it within any application. However, there are costs to moving to new platforms, so for the time being Outlook is the place to be - 300 million users and they have credit cards.

there are companies whose flagship product is a plugin to a popular tool/environment. they are definitely companies.

what are the sufficient conditions for going from feature to company?

Google search was probably seen as a feature rather than a company. I don't know first hand though.

That is definitely true. According to the Battelle book "Search" (good book by the way) and others, they tried to pitch themselves as a tech provider to Yahoo and others. That plan failed since no one was interested, and they went their own way.

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