This week, I had finally had enough. There was no apology that could fix the relationship, no reparations possible. It broke my heart but I had to do it.

I broke up with a product I love.

Xobni is a great Outlook Add-on that indexes all your email, provides neat metrics (like response times) and had a highly usable search interface. I had been using Xobni for months.

Xobni had only one problem: it slowed down not only outlook, but my whole computer. At first I didn't want to admit it: I blamed it on the anti-virus software, then I did numerous registry cleaning sweeps, all to no avail.

So even though I love Xobni and I love using it, I just can't take the slow-downs anymore.

It's not me, it's Xobni

When I uninstalled it, Xobni asked me if I wanted to know when performance issues were fixed.  So Xobni knew there problem was on its end, and it admitted to it.

Now I am eagerly waiting for an email, hoping that I can reconcile with my beloved product.

Where did it go wrong?

I'm not on Xobni's development team. However, I've spent a bit of time on their forums, trying to know the cause (and hopefully the solution) of my problems. What I read was a lot of people writing to say how they loved Xobni and how sad they were that they had to uninstall it. Every once in a while, someone from Xobni's support team would pipe in, asking people to add their antivirus info to the support thread, and suggesting that people clean up their windows registry.

As time passed, the ratio of people who were able to fix their performance issues VS people who had uninstall Xobni changed. There were more and more people removing Xobni. It seems Xobni's development team is having a hard time fixing the performance problem, and users are running out of patience. 

It's that simple: the collective patience of users who believe in the product is running out.

Back to normal, and I hate it

Now I have a fast computer. But I have to make do with Outlook's search engine. I'm unhappy about that, but at least I'm not spending time waiting for my computer.

Tomorrow: How to prevent your customers from breaking up with you