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Xmarks May Not Be Dead After All
gatorfan sends word that Xmarks, which announced its upcoming closure a few days back, may not be so dead after all. The outcry from people willing to pay for the service was so loud that the company has now posted a pledge that users can sign if they are willing to pay for the service, and they say that they have fielded inquiries from several organizations who might be willing to buy the company's assets and keep the service going.
maybe put something in the summary about what it is.
I signed the pledge.
I tried Firefox sync but it's not quite as good and it's not cross-browser.
Gone!
Oddly enough, xmarks does allow backing up to a custom server. I haven't used their official server in a couple of years, because I don't really want them harvesting my bookmarks, nor do I want them examining all my google search results.
I mean it's a neat concept and all, if you like that whole "sharing with a couple million people" thing. I'm just not that guy.
John
Yes, because telling everyone you're closing down and then waiting a couple of days to see them move to alternatives before announcing your clever plan works - way better than just coming out with the news "sorry guys, the only way we can survive is by charging a fee"
That's nonsense of course. You're creating a false dichotomy: either you do what XMarks did or "suddenly becoming a paid service". There would have been plenty of ways to deal with it more graciously, if they had planned to switch to a paid model. But the fact of the matter seems to be that they didn't think there would be enough paying customers. In fact, they've asked their users about this in the past, I've been with them since early beginnings. I think they were simply surprised by the number of users that turned out to be willing to pay, faced with the alternative of the service just disappearing.
What is strange about all this is the fact that XMarks was unable to find a buyer or investor, if it now turns out XMarks can make a living out of selling this service. What did these investors see that XMarks doesn't? Will XMarks survive, or will they come to the same conclusion as the investors and decide it will never make a decent profit?
2 Million a year.
Office building lease, business overhead (insurance, legal consult, business licenses etc) could be 300-500K easily. ...
Couple of executives worth having in a startup.. 150-200K each/year, so another 500K
5 decent programmers. 100G each/year, so 500K
Couple of sysadmins 150K
Server Hardware budget including provisioning/replacement/depreciation 200K
Telecom costs 100K
Office manager, secretary, general cost of business, travel expenses, tradeshows, customer focus groups?
Seriously, if you think 2 million a year is an outrageous budget for a hosted software service, and cross platform software development you have *no* idea what you're talking about.