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Any Need for Orgoo? Or: yet another webmail service

TechCrunch profiles Orgoo, a new online email service. It offers everything that’s good about Yahoo!, the new Hotmail, or GMail with an Outlook-like AJAXy interface and 3gb of storage.

Its source of value and differentiation is IM integration - Orgoo is integrated with all of the IM clients, as opposed to its competitors who integrate only with their house brands (GMail with GTalk, etc.)

My question is this: given the high marginal cost of switching email services (in terms of notifying all of your contacts, etc), and the relatively low marginal benefit of IM integration (how much of a hotbutton issue is this?) does Orgoo have a business model? Especially when one considers that email is a commodity service, that fancy AJAX interfaces are derigeur, and that the market is crowded with hugely resourced and well financed options, is there any point to this?

Without more differentiation, I don’t yet see any reason for any more than a small niche to switch. Perhaps Orgoo is just positioning for a quick-flip develop-to-acquisition cycle a la Oddpost.

EDIT: Michael popped by to point out in the comments that Orgoo is positioned as a front end - i.e.: it can be the UI for whatever email service you choose, accessing your mail service by POP, as with Outlook on your desktop. That would expand the appeal of Orgoo to include those currently separating service from UI, but I wonder…

1. How big an existing segment that is - i.e.: how many email users are their for Outlook, Thunderbird, etc. that could switch to Orgoo?
2. Of the existing split service/UI market segment, how many are dissatisfied enough with their current solution to consider switching?
3. How many of the single service (UI/service) email market segment would consider separating the two and using Orgoo?

I’d still hazard a guess that the potential user pool for Orgoo is relatively small… but I’m generally skeptical about everything.

email, im orgoo

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