News hit tech blogs today, saying that Gist received $6.75m to optimize inboxes, both Outlook and Gmail. Like Xobni, it is a great nice-to-have product that will never make it to the millions of computers owned by Fortune companies. The reasons are simple yet critical: 1) Average employee needs incremental training for this, which didn’t happen for any software except Lotus and MS Office applications in the modern history. 2) Employees, which are risk-averse by nature, will always feel the doubt of "missing-out" some emails due to "imperfection" in algorithm, that they will choose not to use it. Consumer market: Early adopters will adopt the product, and it will stay like that forever… Verdict: No success as a standalone company. Best result is to be acquired in the next 2 years by Microsoft or with a slight chance, Google.