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Dear Microsoft:

I saw over at TechCrunch that Plaxo is for sale.  Now, I realize that
you guys may not know what Plaxo is because you didn’t create it and it
isn’t located within 25 miles of Redmond, WA, but let me explain to you
why I think it might make sense to part with a very small portion of
your $21.5BN in cash to acquire it.

You see Plaxo is, in theory, one of the single most useful plug-ins
for Microsoft Outlook.  I say in theory, because Plaxo is only useful
to the extent other people you know also use it.  That’s because Plaxo
automatically synchronizes contact details between yourself and other
Plaxo users.  In theory, if everyone used Plaxo, then your contact list
would always be up-to-date and 100% accurate.  This would be fantastic
for me and just about every other Outlook user because it would not
only insure that we have always have accurate contact data but it would
eliminate the numerous annoying e-mails we get from people throughout
the year who are changing jobs, cell phone numbers, etc.

As one of the earliest adopters of Plaxo, I remember feeling giddy at
the prospect of everyone soon adopting Plaxo and thereafter entering
into a state of perpetual contact bliss.  Alas, this never happened as
a result a lot of creepy spam-like user acquisition strategies and other generally
bone-headed moves by Plaxo.  Sometime around 2005, I entered into a
state of depressive resignation that my Plaxo-inspire contact bliss
would never be realized, but now with the "leaked" news of their
hoped-for sale by their bankers, my own hopes have been raised that
contact nirvana may yet be achieved.

Why should you guys in particular buy it?  Well I can think of three very good reasons:

1. No one is in a better position to have Plaxo reach its goal of
   near universal adoption than you guys.  You have the clout to embed
   Plaxo into Outlook.  In doing so, you would practically guarantee that
   adoption would skyrocket and as adoption skyrocketed the perceived and
   actual value of Plaxo to its end users would also skyrocket.
2. Plaxo recently released something called Plaxo Pluse, which is
   basically a social network built on top of your contact list.  This is
   a pretty interesting idea and one that holds great promise in existing
   professional circles where someone’s contacts are basically their
   social network to begin with.  By supercharging Plaxo adoption, you
   could also rapidly grow Plaxo pluse which would very quickly create a
   highly credible competitor to Linked-In and probably give you a great
   chance to establish a professional version of Facebook.  What’s more
   you could buy 100% of this social network for far less that the $240M
   you shelled out for just 1.6% of Facebook.
3. What with all the other things you guys have going on you may not
   have noticed that Outlook really hasn’t added a significant new feature
   since, oh, let’s be generous and say 2001.  I can assure you as daily
   user I have noticed this, especially as other mail clients have rolled
   out all manner of cool new features.  Sure you’ve added support for all
   manner of obscure Microsoft products such as Groove, Sharepoint,
   Microsoft CRM, etc., but in terms of actually adding new features that
   make my daily task of sending e-mails, scheduling events, and
   contacting people, I might as well be using Outlook 97 for all I can
   tell.  Yes, you bought LookOut and attempted to integrate
   indexed-search into Outlook, but the Windows team screwed this up
   miserably when they insisted that the whole thing be integrated into
   Windows Desktop Search.  Now I know you guys are great developers and
   all and that no one else appreciates the massive complexity of adding
   features to a mail client, but perhaps you guys could suck up your
   pride a bit and actually go out and buy a feature that is truly useful
   to your patient, but increasingly suffering users.  After all, if
   there’s one application that I spend the most time in, its Outlook, yet
   this application seems to have been completely devoid of innovation in
   recent memory while folks such as Zimbra and GMail make it look like it
   was coded in Fortran in the 70’s.  So, do us dumb-ass end users a favor
   and throw us a bone, add something new, sexy, and truly useful to
   Outlook (and don’t screw it up the way you did LookOut).

Now I know that buying Plaxo won’t be easy for you guys.  After all
it’s a hosted service that uses the Internet and does not take an hour
to install or require you to type in a 30 character sequence of random
numbers and letters.  Still, take it from me, it’s actually a useful
application and it has the potential to help reestablish the relevancy
of Outlook in an age when it is increasingly looking like it will soon
go the way of the dodo bird.

Sincerely,

Bill