Xobni outs Outlook inadequacies

By Stan Beer
Tuesday, 06 May 2008 14:09

Opinion and Analysis

I still begrudgingly use Vista, even after making the mistake of retrograding my system to the monumental stuff-up called SP1. I still use Word and Excel 2007, although there are free alternatives that tempt me. However, I dropped Outlook months ago because it's an unacceptable resources drain. Can a new plug-in called Xobni change my mind?

Xobni (look at a mirror image of the word) is a free plug-in download for Outlook from a San Francisco-based company of the same name. In a nutshell, Xobni indexes and organises all the email information you have locked up in Outlook and then lets you search for it and find it quickly.

From what I've seen of Xobni, it looks to be an interesting tool that will make life easier for Outlook users. However, it will not make me and the many other former Outlook users switch back.

The fact of the matter is that Outlook has long ago passed its use-by date. Since transitioning to Gmail and Google Calendar, I would never again consider using a desktop based system like Outlook. Others say similar things about Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Calendar, just in case anyone thinks I'm especially beating the drum for Google.

I have a pretty powerful desktop computer with 4GB RAM, a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor and an Nvidia GeForce 256MB graphics card. So when Outlook started keeping me waiting while new emails were loading and folders were synchronising, I naturally got more than a little peeved. An email client shouldn't need a supercomputer to run with acceptable performance. That alone was enough to make me look for an alternative. However, poor performance was by no means the only bugbear.

As any traveller who uses a computer while on the road will know, having full access to your emails and calendar is mandatory. It is possible to configure your Outlook system so that you can have access remotely but it's messy and anything but intuitive. Desktop email and calendar clients are simply not made to be shared and accessed from computers other than the one on which they reside.

In contrast, since using a Web-based mail and calendar system I have felt a wonderful sense of freedom. I don't even need to own a computer to get access to my emails and appointments. Microsoft beware because the moment Google gets its documents and spreadsheets products up to an acceptable standard, I'm taking my entire office online and I suspect so will many others.

Having said all of this, it is true that Web mail clients such as Gmail do suffer from some of the same organisational problems as desktop based clients like Outlook - perhaps even more so. That's why it seems a pity that Xobni is focussing its efforts exclusively on Outlook.

With hundreds of millions of Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail users, there's a ready made market for enterprising plug-in cloud computing developers to emulate desktop-bound Xobni and help us to organise our Web-based information. Or perhaps the young startup Xobni, which has so far refused Microsoft's acquisition advances, is already thinking along those lines itself?