Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
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?
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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