As the ecosystem around Twitter has discovered, the platform owners will sooner copy a good feature than buy it if it's cheap enough to build. It's not about OAuth or IMAP, it's about some GOOG PM copying the featureset and putting it in the MRD for the next release.
I think that depends on how sophisticated a service is. I agree that applying some regular expressions to emails is not enough to make any other company buy you instead of building it themselves. But that holds for almost anything a startup can do.
Startups need to solve difficult problems or they are nothing more than marketing firms trying to create a hype around hot air. Filtering email intelligently, including automatic anonymization of sensitive parts within the email, can be a difficult problem to solve, and I think there are many types of email integration that a startup could tackle based on the approach Matt suggests.
Twitter has actually made 4 acquisitions. Perhaps they were talent acquisitions but the still apply. I suspect that they have a buy/build strategy of some kind - i.e. could we build this product faster than the people who built it? If not, we want them on our team.
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As the ecosystem around Twitter has discovered, the platform owners will sooner copy a good feature than buy it if it's cheap enough to build. It's not about OAuth or IMAP, it's about some GOOG PM copying the featureset and putting it in the MRD for the next release.
[edit: a famous bit of company-is-a-feature carnage for reference: STAC vs. Microsoft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics ]
Which makes me wonder why Matt can't get this championed internally or for someone's 20% project?
I think that depends on how sophisticated a service is. I agree that applying some regular expressions to emails is not enough to make any other company buy you instead of building it themselves. But that holds for almost anything a startup can do.
Startups need to solve difficult problems or they are nothing more than marketing firms trying to create a hype around hot air. Filtering email intelligently, including automatic anonymization of sensitive parts within the email, can be a difficult problem to solve, and I think there are many types of email integration that a startup could tackle based on the approach Matt suggests.
Twitter has actually made 4 acquisitions. Perhaps they were talent acquisitions but the still apply. I suspect that they have a buy/build strategy of some kind - i.e. could we build this product faster than the people who built it? If not, we want them on our team.