Comments on: Why Yahoo Buying Xoopit Is a Smart Move

By: 20 Reasons Not to Start an Email Startup: Tech News «

20 Reasons Not to Start an Email Startup: Tech News « — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 21:01:17 +0000

[...] coming from a guy who raised $6.5 million in funding and sold his company to Yahoo for $20 million in 2009. Yahoo bought his company because they had pivoted into hosted search service for [...]

By: How the Email Inbox Can Become An App Platform

How the Email Inbox Can Become An App Platform — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 12:56:44 +0000

[...] raised more than $100 million. Xobni later acquired the Zaplets IP. (Xoopit was later bought by Yahoo for about $20 million and now it’s a widget within Yahoo Mail.) Xobni sidebar in [...]

By: Jack

Jack — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 07:53:03 +0000

I agree with Eric Smith. Xoopit is hard to implement as a firefox plugin from an engineering perspective — but it could be way easier for email providers themselves to do so.

The only question we raise here — why Xoopit worth $20 million? I think Yahoo should invest in Xoopit instead of take it all.

By: Tech Whiz Underground » AT&T chief: iPhone won’t be exclusive forever

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:33:45 +0000

[...] Yahoo Buying Xoopit for $20M? [...]

By: dave

dave — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:38:18 +0000

nope – the svp said in some blog post yesterday that they’ll still offer the firefox extension for gmail users…keep your fingers crossed…

By: Brent

Brent — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:32:07 +0000

Is it cynical of me to think that Yahoo is buying a competitor’s innovator simply to bury it? Yahoo already dominates email.

By: David Robins

David Robins — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:42:48 +0000

good for Xoopit. In this market to be bought out by a major (although stagnant) player is not a bad achievement!!!

By: Will Yahoo Use Xoopit’s CloudQuery to Help Usher in the Real-time Web?

Will Yahoo Use Xoopit’s CloudQuery to Help Usher in the Real-time Web? — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:53:02 +0000

[...] PM PT | 0 comments While Xoopit’s flagship email product is being touted as the reason why Yahoo agreed to buy the company, I think the underlying technology used by Xoopit is far more interesting. Xoopit has even exposed [...]

By: Ericson Smith

Ericson Smith — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:51:56 +0000

Hmmm…

1. You extract all the attachments from emails
2. You tag them by source, and other tags and meta information found in the email itself
3. You can filter the attachments by source, date, tags
4. You can show all photos by date, source, person, tags
5. You can share photos with friends
6. Yahoo can pull together galleries of photos with same meta info/tags if users give green light

In fact Xoopit is less efficient and vastly slower than if Yahoo did it themselves, because they have to login to the email account and download then process the mail (see integration with gmail). Yahoo has access to all of it already, making the job vastly easier and orders of magnitude faster. Their database simply has to point to the existing attachments, since Yahoo already hosts all those attachments on their clusters.

Potential issues? Scaling (yahoo does that). Servers? (yahoo has those). Front end to browse photos — easy to build. Database to store photos (easy also). Search engine? (yahoo does that well enough).

Not sure if there is more to it than that, but I await with interest and will gladly say so if I’m proven wrong.

By: Gadget Sleuth

Gadget Sleuth — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:48:24 +0000

Yahoo buying anyone isn’t a “big move” right now…except for the bank accounts of the sellers.

By: Will Robertson

Will Robertson — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:47:32 +0000

Looking forward to that post.

Posts like that are what makes this such a good and interesting blog. Real, quality content.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:44:38 +0000

Guys we have a post coming up which will explain why Xoopit technology isn’t as simple as it seems. I think most people are missing out on the big picture here: it this company and its core technologies helps Yahoo deliver better email experience, then it should.

If they got an internal team to do this it would still take time. If there is a problem then that is of management and people in charge. They should have seen the big changes coming two years ago and built towards this. Starting now it would not be that easy.

By: Kapil

Kapil — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:22:15 +0000

Agree with Om, getting things done was a challenge for yahoo as is for any big company. Due to their size, politics, inter-team bickering, bureaucracy it just becomes all the more difficult to innovate. Its been pointed out in the write-up as well – that the challenge still remains to integrate the product into yahoo’s stack.

Thats why you see most big-sized companies growing in-organically – IBM, Google, MS are few examples. Its not about not having the engineering brain to build a product, its about bringing the right people together and building a product, thats where startups excel.

In any case xoopit seems like a great team and a good product, wish them all the luck with yahoo.

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:11:29 +0000

I agree with the various comments that buying companies with “simple” technology you want but can’t manage to build yourself is a sign about the state of your world. AOL did this repeatedly and had little / no success in integrating.

On the pricing side of the discussion, I think that buyers have finally started to figure out whether they’re buying a startup that actually has a BUSINESS or whether they’re buying one that has a FEATURE. There are SO many startups that are the latter… a good idea (even a REALLY good idea) that will never amount to anything more than a feature embedded in some other product. They can’t possibly be worth what the former group are.

By: John

John — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:38:08 +0000

I second the opinion of ‘engineerdude’. It is a disastrous waste of money on things that are trivial. Xoopit doesn’t add anything that could be valued at $20 million. Hiring 10 really smart engineers and paying them $500K would have gotten similar things done in six months. It is this kind of wasteful spending that has left yahoo in current situation. Afterall, xoopit isn’t more than a feature which can easily be replicated by inhouse engineering team.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:59:46 +0000

Good point… the point is that it wasn’t done. I think getting things done is a big challenge for Yahoo, as I pointed out in my post. They are a bureaucratic mess and the only reason they bought this is to speed up things. They certainly had the time to get it done for a long long time… but decisions by committee lead to Soviet Union.

On Zimbra, we should talk. you want to email me? Use the form and I will hit you back.