Techcrunch has an article about Microsoft signing a Letter of Intent to to buy Xobni. Xobni has an Outlook plugin that turns your inbox into your own personal social network. It looks like a pretty nifty program although I haven't used it myself. It is still in Beta Invite mode.
What is interesting to me is the question posted by one of the readers. He asked why didn't Microsoft just buy Plaxo instead, since to him it fit more into Microsoft's strategy. I posit that there are two main reasons.
First, Xobni is an Outlook plugin, if it experiences a significant uptake then there is immediately more reason to use outlook. Tie-in means market share.
Second, buying them means Xobni won't port the plugin to other mail clients, effectively killing the possibility of a Xobni user to move to a different mail client or even OS.
Hmmm... Maybe that should be the strategy for startups that have a cool idea and want to get bought out quickly.
1. Build something on the Microsoft platform exclusively.
2. Build some buzz about your product.
3. Get a LOI from Microsoft. Cha-Ching!!!!
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