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Comment by qeorge | Hacker News Reader

Not sure that applies here. Even if Gmail discountinued OAuth support, you could just fall back to IMAP.

As the ecosystem around Twitter has discovered, the platform owners will sooner copy a good feature than buy it if it's cheap enough to build. It's not about OAuth or IMAP, it's about some GOOG PM copying the featureset and putting it in the MRD for the next release.

[edit: a famous bit of company-is-a-feature carnage for reference: STAC vs. Microsoft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics ]

Which makes me wonder why Matt can't get this championed internally or for someone's 20% project?

Twitter has actually made 4 acquisitions. Perhaps they were talent acquisitions but the still apply. I suspect that they have a buy/build strategy of some kind - i.e. could we build this product faster than the people who built it? If not, we want them on our team.

I think that depends on how sophisticated a service is. I agree that applying some regular expressions to emails is not enough to make any other company buy you instead of building it themselves. But that holds for almost anything a startup can do.

Startups need to solve difficult problems or they are nothing more than marketing firms trying to create a hype around hot air. Filtering email intelligently, including automatic anonymization of sensitive parts within the email, can be a difficult problem to solve, and I think there are many types of email integration that a startup could tackle based on the approach Matt suggests.

I think the worry is more that Google will offer the same service, for free, built into GMail.

Like when Twitter acquired Tweetie and gave it away for free?

It doesn't seem like it's terribly impacted the other players, at least that's my perception. (could be wrong - someone with hard stats pls correct me)

My point being: that fear alone while is a rational one, should not be the only criteria to definitively say that an idea should not be pursued b/c it guarantees that you will fail in your startup

Not like that. That's buying the leading competitor and putting your brand on their product. It's still competing on a pretty even playing field with all the others. What people here are talking about is bundling a clone of your product in with the main product. When Microsoft made IE a part of Windows, it killed Netscape and basically the entire market of for-profit browsers forever. When Apple knocked off Karelia's Watson and included it with the system, it killed that product. Ditto with Konfabulator, which was destroyed by Dashboard.

The danger is that when your app can be absorbed into something more popular. They don't compete with you — they just destroy the market for what you do.

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