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Comment by Fuca | Hacker News Reader

I think these guys will make money, but not as much as the 20m they just turn down.

In a year these features will be developed in every email client.

You are dramatically overestimating the speed with which large products develop (especially Outlook). Even if they started last year, it still wouldn't ship for years.

In addition, after it ships, it will take years for the new version to be deployed to a significant portion of existing users.

That's also true of Xobni, or any new application. Plugins may face a lower uptake barrier, but it depends on the organization. MS effectively forces businesses to upgrade Outlook every few years, and without the stick (and carrots) that MS wields, it can be a challenge to get anything new into a business.

But, it's true that a small company can deliver to the people who will upgrade or install new tools in ways that a large company generally cannot. But the slow adopters are going to be slow adopters no matter who builds the application.

accidentally downmodded, sorry

I'm not sure of what can be added to something like gmail to be honest,

Gmail search: fantastic, threaded conversations: fantastic, search for attachments etc: all works fine.

For me, Gmail just works great. I'm not really interested in seeing a graph/analytics for emails to be honest.

Obviously it makes sense for outlook, since that is a very very painful thing to use, but I'd be surprised if ms don't just fix search and add threaded conversations in the next version.

Xobni search for Outlook is much better than Gmail's native search, and they have no native platform for managing attachments well, which is, imho, one of the value props Xobni has.

I don't understand why all focus on the statistics/analytics features. It might be smart of the company to either remove it or minimize its presence because I've seen so many take the route of "analytics? whoop dee doo."

Also, if Xobni would like to be a stand-alone email/CRM one day, integration with as many email applications is quite necessary.

The statistics and analytics features serve (IMHO) as initial attraction hooks. For example, a lot of people I know went to GMail because of the 1GB space thing rather than all the revolutionary features inside. They discovered all the goodies only as they started using it. I think a similar thing happens with the colorful graph that Xobni shows. If you think about it, nobody would give a damn about what that graph is showing. But as Gabor points out in the article, if I am passing by, that's the first thing I'd get attracted by. It just looks really really spiffy.

From the article I found this graph interesting http://gigaom.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/xobni_mail_client_.... Outlook 400 M - Lotus 250 M - Yahoo Mail 260 M - Hotmail 200 - Gmail 100 - Apple Mail 50 M - Thunderbird 30 M

This totals 1290 M , now if their market penetration is 0.5% (i.e. 0.05) and they sell the product for 1 dollar that's 60 million in revenue

Lets try another what if. What if they sell it for 20 dollars, how much market penetration to they need to make 100 Mil revenue!

~0.39% (0.0039)

I am guessing they played a math game. And the math says, unless they totally suck, they will pass that 20 million sooner than spending 20 million

Finally we meet some business men in the startup software market

pick your market, before you pick your product

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