LimitNone: Why You Should Build a Product, Not a Feature

LimitNone is learning a very difficult, and probably very expensive, lesson: you need to build a product of your own, and not a feature for someone else's product.

The start-up had an agreement with Google that allowed Google to see their "trade secrets" for an app they had built to bridge users from Microsoft Outlook into Gmail. When Google turned around and built out a feature to do the same thing, LimitOne filed suit for deceptive business practices. They claim that Google was having trouble building a tool to migrate customers from Outlook to Gmail and Google Apps, and needed them to assist.

According to PCPro, LimitNone has brought in the same law firm that unsuccessfully sued Google in an AdWords case. The suit was eventually dropped when the company suing Google ran out of money, which should be a lesson to LimitNone itself; even if they do have a valid cause for suit, Google's money will undoubtedly outlast what LimitOne can afford.

It's a callous response, but Google is a huge company with many more resources than a small start-up. Any time a company builds an application that is really a feature for an existing product, they run the same risk that LimitNone did; a large company can build it much faster because they have the resources to do it. Speed to market is no guarantee of a buyout as an exit strategy, epsecially when you are dealing with a major player with as many resources as Google.

If LimitNone's argument is really that Google was "having a hard time doing it" I don't its case is going to get very far. Google can quickly hire people with any skill set they need, and it's hard to believe that in their entire company, they couldn't find developers who could build out the fucntionality. LimitNone's attorney claims that lost revenue is around $950 million, but Google is offering their tool for free, so where is the revenue?

While their suit will go on for as long as they have money to spend on it, LimitNone has since changed their focus away from the Google tool and on to something new: the iPhone. Let's hope history doesn't repeat.

via TechDirt