From Xobni's perspective:
1. What is the long term roadmap for Xobni?
2. Will merging with MSFT slow down innovation?
and the most important question
3. What is the right acquisition price for Xobni?
Xobni roughly raised 4.25 million Series A. At that time they probably had a decent prototype to demo at Khosla ventures -- which means that (pure speculation) 20-35% of the company is owned by the VC's. Ideally the VC's would like to make roughly 3-10X of their investment, which means 15 to 45 million.
From Adam and Matt's perspective, they have a winner on their hands, and they would want to maximize their ROI on selling Xobni and make sure they never have to work again:-). The longer they wait, the more users they get. And, clearly their pace of innovation is going to be faster than msft.
From MSFT's perspective:
1. Does Xobni have enough users?
2. How frequently do people use Xobni?
3. Can Xobni scale with large mailboxes?
4. Should MSFT buy it or build something similar?
[From using Xobni for a few months, I can say that it's a kick ass product]
From Xobni's perspective: 1. What is the long term roadmap for Xobni? 2. Will merging with MSFT slow down innovation?
and the most important question
3. What is the right acquisition price for Xobni?
From MSFT's perspective: 1. Does Xobni have enough users? 2. How frequently do people use Xobni? 3. Can Xobni scale with large mailboxes? 4. Should MSFT buy it or build something similar?[From using Xobni for a few months, I can say that it's a kick ass product]
my 2 cents.