Microsoft acquires Xobni, good or bad?
April 18th, 2008 | by Laurent FP |
Speculations (here , here) [may have been] were true. Yesterday, Xobni finally came [is rumored to have come] to an agreement with Microsoft to be acquired. An official announcement with the details has yet to be made.
Is this really the best way to go for this promising startup? From what I understood, they had an issue with how to monetize their product. Plans were unclear and being acquired that early may make sense to the founders although, as a simple user, it makes me uneasy about the future of this product.
As a market, this is definitely a stepping stone towards Microsoft aim at socializing its tools, and more specifically Outlook. A few companies have started real work on the topic of Inbox 2.0 and we are starting to see some results with Xoopit, Xobni and Yahoo. Microsoft was trailing and Google seems far being. We will see a lot more in the next few months and we should not be looking at emails the same way next spring.
Update: Following this small post, quite a number of you had questions about the source. As you can imagine I do have one, unfortunately I can’t show something for it. I hope someone else will be able to confirm the acquisition soon, independently. In the meantime, the first sentences has been reworded.
Update 2008-05-05: Read the ongoing follow-up here.
Technology entrepreneur based in Paris, I moved from Montreal late last year and founded 
6 Responses to “Microsoft acquires Xobni, good or bad?”
By Tommy on Apr 18, 2008 | Reply
Now where did you pick this up? Really would like to see another source.
By Jeremy Fain on Apr 18, 2008 | Reply
Mmm, it seems to be pure misinformation. I started to believe this but it appears it’s just wrong: XOBNI, to this day, is still independent, and I wish XOBNI a happy growth stage & IPO in a few years of time.
By Laurent FP on Apr 18, 2008 | Reply
In a way, I wish it was just misinformation especially because I would love to see Xobni stay private. We’ll have to wait for the official details.
By Andrew Lampert on Apr 19, 2008 | Reply
It’s unfortunate that you don’t provide indication of its source, nor any way of verifying your claims. Anything more you can say?