There was a rumor recently that Xobni was to be acquired by MSFT. I could certainly see that happening, Xobni is an email inbox on crack… I saw it at TC40… right now, it’s compatible with MSFT Outlook alone.
While MSFT remains a likely company to buy it (as does Google, believe it or not), I think Facebook should use some of that $240M MSFT money and offer to acquire Xobni. How much would it cost? I don’t know. Xobni has raised about $5M so even though investors want 5, 10, 100x return, I think they would sell for Facebook equity, even if it means at an inflated $15B valuation.
Why? The backers are: First Round Capital, Atomico, Khosla Ventures and I think those funds would love to get their hands on Facebook stock. Had they invested $10-50M, I would not say this, but a fat multiple on $5M in financing won’t make a change on their balance sheet or fund performance… but getting some Facebook skin (you can thank me for avoiding the reference to ’skin on Mark Zuckerberg’) would be preferred, I think.
Let’s face it, it beats cold hard cash from MSFT. Did I just say that? Yeah, scrap that last line… you know what I mean, hopefully. Of course, the initial thinking on this is: MSFT would not welcome this… but if you look yonder - way yonder - MSFT will eventually buy Facebook (no one else will, especially with a $15B floor price) if it does not build a business to IPO… then MSFT might prefer to have Facebook handle integrating Xobni.
All of this is Ash talking smack, of course… but the more I pontificate about this, the more plausible it all becomes…
Especially as MSFT ingests and integrates Yahoo!
Note: Long YHOO.
Related:
- Facebook vs. Google - Clash of the Titans - aka. email is the ultimate social network
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March 20th, 2008 at 7:30 am
At least two reasons why this is silly.
1. Xobni is cute. And that’s about it. Uninstalled after a week or so. It might seem useful from an abstract perspective, but I don’t need to know when I email Joe or what our I/O ratio is–I already know this intuitively if I interact with Joe a lot and, way more importantly, who cares? Xobni traffics in extremely low value information. Yes, it captured information, no it’s not lasting, meaningful information that changes the way you work and interact with messaging.
2. Technically, little that Xobni’s doing is special. You could replicate this functionality for about 1-2MM onshore. It’s just not that special. Also, the search implementation sucks and works worse than native Outlook 2007 or Lookout. Build a better, more elegant search metaphor into Outlook and then you have something users will care about.
I do like the fact that Xobni will open others’ eyes to the fact that email should track more personalization, email needs to bring more FB style SN into the client. Xobni however doesn’t add meaningful presence information or link to anything deeper on the back end. It’s window dressing and that’s about it.
Good PR though.
March 20th, 2008 at 7:39 am
Dear Duh, thanks for the clarification.
What led to this post was me logging in to Facebook to retrieve the contact of someone who had emailed me and realizing what a disaster Facebook email was.
Xobni seemed like something cool, but indeed, I’ve never used it… and unless it was bought by someone, probably never would.