Microsoft Signs Letter Of Intent To Acquire Xobni

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/20/microsoft-signs-letter-of-intent-to-acquire-xobni/

by raghus • 18 years ago

57 61 18 years ago

steveblgh7• 18 years ago

I'm not sure how this makes any sense for Microsoft. If they assigned a few engineers to work on this, they could replicate the functionality within few months, especially since they know the internals of Outlook.

veritas• 18 years ago

Features aren't the only thing they're getting.

The guys at Xobni are extremely talented and Microsoft always wants talented engineers.

steveblgh7• 18 years ago

Paying millions of dollars for a few talented engineers, who will probably work half-heartedly for a few months/year, depending on the clauses in the contract, then move on to the next startup? Come on, USD is not that weak.

tokipin• 18 years ago

and if they did replicate it, everyone would call them assholes. maybe they're trying not to paint a bad image of themselves

euccastro• 18 years ago

Or phrasing it in a more positive way: by rewarding these guys they are encouraging others to do R&D for them.

It's not like a few million more or less mean much to Microsoft anyway.

ajju2• 18 years ago

Microsoft not doing something that could make them money and is in all likelihood perfectly legal (not that that has stopped them in the past) just to "not be called assholes"? Really?

mattmaroon4• 18 years ago

There's a lot more to replicating something like Xobni in a megacorporation like MSFT than just the programming. In a lot of cases it's easier to get an acquisition signed off on than a new department to make a new product.

And they get more than just code, and people who write code. They get a little street cred back in the hacker community for picking up a YC startup. They get people who have vision, which MSFT appears to be in need of these days. It could be the beginning of a new era for them.

Also, Xobni has had a number of high quality engineers (probably much better than what you'd typically find slaving away in the trenches at MSFT) working on their plugin for a lot more than a few months. I'm guessing the programming cost would be a lot higher than you might think.

steveblgh7• 18 years ago

I think you nailed it with the line: "they get a little street cred back in the hacker community for picking up a YC startup".

Exactly what I was thinking. If it's not the features, not the engineers, it must be the positive buzz they get for it. Probably this is some lame attempt by Microsoft to appear cool and show that they understand the new wave.

random1• 18 years ago

I think there is a ill informed mentality that somehow hackers are "smarter" than the coders working at Microsoft. To be honest most of the people I have met at the startup community aren't really all that special in terms of "intelligence" but they do have that drive which is what makes them special. I just think people in this community need to stop ego boosting themselves... yes some of you are probably pretty smart... but most of you aren't impressively smart or talented -- just very driven... (which is a great trait by the way)

as far as the actual commentary goes I think Microsoft is doing it because honestly 30-40 million is chump change for them and yeah they could develop it but why bother when you already have it tall done and the structure already setup?

alaskamiller3• 18 years ago

That's a giant slap in the face of every engineer working in a big corporation.

pg3• 18 years ago

Really? Building an OS that works is a solved problem, and they don't seem to be able to do that.

The reason big companies buy startups is because they can't do what they "could" do.

steveblgh7• 18 years ago

Come on, building a working OS is a gigantic effort. Last time I checked Xobni was regex-ing phone numbers and names from e-mail texts, plus some fancy GUI of the kind that you said in one essay that you hate (messing around with obscure Windows APIs). Following your reasoning, the Xobni guys could have more easily built a full OS, which, with all respect, I seriously doubt.

steveblgh7• 18 years ago

In the same time a feature idea for news.yc & reddit:

the number of votes on a comment should become visible only after someone voted already, similarly to online polls. This would prevent people from mindlessly agreeing with popular opinion, and in the same time it would encourage more people to vote, out of curiosity to see the result.

yters3• 18 years ago

Isn't the real cause of their problems maintaining backwards compatibility? As I understand it, Apple doesn't do this, making it easier for them to create a good OS.

wright8• 18 years ago

> If they assigned a few engineers to work on this, they could replicate the functionality within few months, especially since they know the internals of Outlook.

Counter-exhibit 1: Vista.

Apparently the MS development process makes it almost impossible to get anything done within the bureaucracy these days.

Their best results are from their research groups (e.g. Haskell) but those are people paid to work on what they want to work on anyway.

You can't just assign developers randomly to something and get the same results.

In fact, given Outlook's bugs and lack of functionality in these areas you could make a pretty compelling argument that, despite their knowledge of its internals, those are about the last people you'd want to put in charge of making Outlook work. They already got their shot and look what happened!

tlb• 18 years ago

I assume your estimates of how hard it is and how fast the Outlook team can develop are completely ex-recto.

Here's some data. Outlook's last two major releases were in '03 and '06. In those 3 years they added the following visible features:

  - todo bar

  - better calendar UI

  - RSS aggregator

  - search

[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Outlook]

Xobni might be as useful and interesting as all those combined, and the Xobni team can deliver it today. The evidence suggests that Microsoft would take years to deliver something similar.

steveblgh7• 18 years ago

My estimates weren't ex-recto as you said. I took a brief look at Xobni, and thought that even I could have done it in a few months. Then a few engineers from MS could do it even more easily.

gregp• 18 years ago

When did xobni get started,anyone know?

nostrademons• 18 years ago

Says in the article. Apr 1 2006. I suspect that was the first public demo, since they were WFP06 and so probably started around Dec 05 or Jan 06.

plusbryan• 18 years ago

Close. We were SFP06. I recall driving with Matt to the PO with the paperwork sometime in early May 06.

fleaflicker2• 18 years ago

Why does this stuff get leaked to the press? What happened to confidentiality?

mattmaroon4• 18 years ago

I would guess it gets leaked to the press by people who will eventually want favors in return. Sometimes it might be founders who want to prod other potential acquirers.

fleaflicker2• 18 years ago

Often a letter of intent will frobid the seller from negotiating with anybody else.

alex_c2• 18 years ago

If this goes through, congrats to the Xobni team!

Monti• 18 years ago

Wow, so they are a YC startup?? congratz to all people involved.

jonathan• 18 years ago

Congrats guys! Hell of a job

Emmjaykay• 18 years ago

I wanted to go work for them someday. :`(

But maybe it'll be like how the TellMe deal went. They're still more or less independent.

rantfoil• 18 years ago

This is fantastic for Xobni. Congrats.

Hopefully Xobni is able to secure contractual assurances that they'll be able to maintain a level of sovereignty to continue to work on their amazing vision. Microsoft, from experience, is a patchwork of fiefdoms, some the domain of engineering teams, and some product marketing. A team at Microsoft can easily get lost in the shuffle or killed randomly, without a strong exec as high up in the org as possible to make things work.

Cautionary tale: Lookout, that fantastic Outlook plugin that got bought and then promptly taken offline / never heard from again. I believe they were folded into Live Desktop Search. (Will leave it to an exercise to the reader as to whether that was a good move.)

Microsoft Signs Letter Of Intent To Acquire Xobni

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