Xobni - wouldn't get out of bed for $20m Friday, May 02, 2008

In a recent blog post I expressed a negative opinion on the usefulness of Xobni and astonishment that Microsoft would have shown any interest in buying them, particularly at a reported $20m.

Evidently I wasn't alone in this view. It certainly caused something of a storm on Y Combinator's forum, Hacker News, partly because the venture is Y Combinator backed.

Now it appears Xobni have walked away from the deal discussions. According to Techcrunch,

[Xobni felt un]comfortable it felt about its eventual fate inside the Microsoft machine. The fear was that Xobni would end up nothing more than a feature of Outlook. Microsoft wanted the entire team to move up to Redmond, and was vague in its answers about what it had planned for that team, or the product. In the end, the body language just wasn’t there.

Duh? What is Xobni OTHER THAN a feature of Outlook? Whilst I've seen it rumoured that they want to replicate their offering on other email clients, how can it be anything other than a feature? You have to suspect these folks are simply holding out for more money. But that is a dangerous game since it's hard to see another obvious buyer for Xobni who they can play Microsoft off against, especially since there is no clear revenue stream opportunities with the product - do you really want ads inside Outlook or would you really pay in order to get the "information" being thrown up about email traffic?

This is one lucky lottery ticket that Xobni should quickly cash and congratulate themselves on getting so much for so little.

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Xobni - what a waste of money Monday, April 21, 2008

Xobni [Inbox spelt backwards] is a company that offers an outlook plugin that supposedly uncovers relationships from your inbox. With Bill Gates apparently as a fan it was perhaps inevitable that Microsoft would be trying to buy them and perhaps it was quicker than trying to replicate what they did.

However, having tried the add-in during beta, on a version of Outlook running on the family PC into which I downloaded my business email from our webmail server [I use a webmail client rather than Outlook and Xobni only works in Outlook], I confess I found it pointless. Looking at stats which ranked contacts by email volume exchanged or their "connections" based on who else was included on emails had no on-going value and hardly passed the curiosity test.

Unsurprisingly, the add-in also slowed Outlook down and consumed valuable screen space.

After persevering for 2 weeks, it simply got uninstalled and hasn't been missed.

I've found services like GTD Inbox, which is a gmail add-in for helping managing your inbox to be immensely more useful than Xobni was. Throw in a LinkedIn add-in for connecting and keeping tabs with your contacts and Xobni looks like a solution looking for a problem.

Could it be some Microsoft underling thinks that they will make the old boss happy by interpreting his admiration to mean they should spend over $20m on this "feature". It's also a sad reflection of Microsoft that they couldn't either internally innovate and create such "solutions", nor create a similar add-in themselves given the enormous resources at their disposal - or is it that internal bureaucracy means they can't develop anything cheaply?

UPDATE
Please excuse my sloppy spelling errors earlier, which I've corrected. Apparently, such errors undermine any opinion you may venture in the minds of the groupies that hangout in the Y Combinator hallways. To correct some of the misunderstandings and prejudices of other contributors to the Hacker News thread though
- 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.

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