"I realize that many of you don't use Outlook anymore and have moved on to Gmail or some other better way to do mail."
For me that says it all.
Maybe it'll be useful in corporate environments that force people to use outlook, but beyond that I'm not so sure it has much of a shelf life.
(a) mind-blowingly huge;
(b) totally accustomed to paying serious money for software;
(c) almost universally dependent on the Microsoft stack for supporting end users, and that means Outlook for optimal integration with Exchange, Active Directory, etc.;
(d) totally addicted to e-mail.
Admittedly, it's also
(e) resistant to change and chock-full of drones content with maintaining the status quo. Still, if the Xobnis are persistent, if they keep working on this thing, they'll have a gold mine on their hands.
Way back when Akamai was starting up, I figured it wouldn't have much of a shelf life, because people would soon start writing cache-friendly pages, and cache servers would make Akamai's core service obsolete.
I still think a cache network would be superior, but Akamai isn't going away any time soon.
Similarly, I think you're in for a surprise as to how slowly change spreads. Corporate environments will likely use Outlook way past its shelf life.
It blew me away at work. I'd shell out 10 bucks for what's out today, and 50 bucks if it would (relatively accurately) bring the very most important messages to the top of my inbox (messages from my boss, where my boss is cc'd, or from people I historically reply to ASAP). Maybe also auto-suggesting/creating rules to filter out e-mail that's not junk, but not super relevant. Maybe 100 bucks for that.
We have a long way to go before we reach Loopt's success. Loopt is making some serious dough. We have a lot of work to do, but it is great to hear from users how much they like what we have built.
http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/misc/199805/intertwingle.htm...