Google Sued for $1B Over Outlook Migration Tool

Tag : contract product development

LimitNone's only hope is language in a written contract promisingthat Google won't compete with their product. Absent that, they'retoast. Let's face it, their product isn't much. There's nothing init that hasn't been well-known and in wide use for the last 30years, and thus can't be a trade secret. Google obviously knowstheir own formats and APIs for loading messages into gMail. In factthey had to have created them before LimitNone's product existed,if they hadn't LN couldn't have created their product at all. Thefile formats and things like Exchange server APIs aren't exactlysecret. Copying all messages from one to the other is the samebasic copy loop that's been used for 40-some years: open input;while not eof(input) do read(input); write(output); done; closeinput. A loop to iterate through folders and some recursion tohandle subfolders, I was doing that in high school. Look and feel?LimitNone's probably using the standard tree-view widgets providedby the system, so yes Google's app will look like theirs becauseboth of them look like the standard system widgets. That's assumingthe apps allow message-level selectivity, if they limit it tofolder-level or "everything on this server", the UI's even moregeneric. And the concept of importing mail messages from an oldclient into a new one? Hardly new. Mail clients have been importingother client's mailboxes since as long as there've been mailclients. Thunderbird has been doing it IIRC for a couple years now,well before LimitNone's product was created.
LimitNone's problem is that they're trying to charge $29 for abasic one-shot function that comes standard with most mail clientsand that frankly could be hacked up by a single programmer in a fewweeks of full-time work.