Xobni’s walk out from Microsoft deal : Smart Decision or..?
If you have noticed all the big acquisitions that has happened in the last few years, most of the acquired products lost their mojo post-acquisition.
Take Google’s acquisitions for instance – they acquired Blogger, Keyhole, Jotspot, Trendalyzer, Tonic, Jaiku, FeedBurner etc; and except youtube, all of these acquisitions have ended up as a small feature in the entire product suite – stripped of all novelty and attention they deserved.
And that’s why Xobni decided to walk out of Microsoft’s ~$20mn acquisition deal – in the fear of being obscured by MS cloud!
But the deeper that Xobni got into the discussions, the less 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. [TC]
I believe this is a classic dilemma any startup faces – i.e. soak all energy and cross the chasm (if you are lucky, get there or burn out) or just get acquired and end up in spasm!
Xobni, if acquired by MS will end up being just an outlook plugin – and at the same time, lose (in all probability) an opportunity to build plugins for other email clients.
What do you think is the tradeoff of such decision – Immediate success vs. Long term struggle?
BTW – Xobni is the opp. of Inbox - isn’t that ultra cool?
tags: xobni
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It might be a negotiation ploy to shoot up the price still i think its a risk worth taking .
Xobni have two things in their favor
#1 They are Funded and they have considerable interest from VC to fund them in subsequent rounds .
#2 There name is Xobni not kooltuo so i think their appeal should extend well beyond Outlook.
They are trying to integrate with yahoo mail and other web based email service provider . this can turn out to be a killer value proposition . unlike other social network value of Xobni is intrinsic to it . its useful for you , even if you are the only person in world who is using it .
this is a little scary as company is in Private beta only ,validation from mass market is yet to come . if they fail in executing here than this might look like stupidity.
on the other hand this is a humbling thing for MS as Bill Gates himself demoed there application to world at a MS event . whatever happen to Xobni but their team has seen few high points which is worth the trouble i guess . isn’t it ?
negotiation could be one way – but I guess, they are smart enough to not sleep with MS, if they dont see a future there. MS will never allow these guys to build plugins for gmail, y! mail, thunderbird etc. – so if they walk out of the deal, they have no option but to fight on their own.