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Software upstart sues Google
A SMALL STARTUP software company sued Google on Monday for allegedly having stolen its trade secrets concerning software tools for migrating Microsoft Outlook users to Gmail.
Limitnone LLC filed a lawsuit in Illinois complaining that Google deceived it into disclosing concepts and methods for converting Microsoft Outlook email, address books and calendars to Google's Gmail, then terminated their collaboration and built the software toolset itself.
The tiny five-person startup said it entered into a confidentiality agreement with Google in March 2007 to share its trade secrets with Google's engineers, salespeople and certain key prospective Google Apps customers. Limitnone said Google then told it last December that it would develop the software itself, shutting the startup out of its major business opportunity.
Limitnone claims it designed an email migration tool called "Gmove" in collaboration with Google, that Google's free "Email Uploader" that it launched earlier this year is "almost identical" to Gmove and that "both operate under a similar conceptual design." Limitnone's lead attorney David Rammelt told Reuters in a phone interview that the company's estimate of its lost revenue is "about $950 million."
The lawsuit seeks actual and punitive damages plus attorneys' fees. Google was reportedly not immediately available to comment. µ
L'Inq
Reuters
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950 mil to migrate outlook contacts. Sounds like I'm in the wrong business. Except, it's been done before, many times. Regardless of whether google screwed them or not, $950 mil is a joke. No wonder google did it themselves.
Google is following Microsoft's footprints.
I wonder if Apple feels the same way about Microsoft's taking the windows UI interface and rewriting it for PC.
Perhaps we could sue Google for abusive use of "G" terms, or even worse, misuse of "o" letters. Suing Google seems like the big trend now...
Not good news for Google's MetaDataMining Operations
I wonder if Apple fanboys will ever get it though their heads that Apple nicked the whole GUI concept from Xerox.
Actually, Apple got the windows idea from Xerox in much the same way Google got their ideas from Limitnone.
OK, so MSFT doesn't exactly fall over itself to make migration of data from Outlook easy. But its not exactly hard. Everyone does it. As for migrating it to Gmail -- Google's hardly going to want to migrate it to something else. It should be a routine piece of software done "for hire" or purchased at a reasonable price. My guess is the "tiny startup" had an unrealistic revenue model -- they priced them out of the job. They're not the first people to do this (CP/M anyone?).
I wonder if Xerox feels the same way about Apple taking the PARC graphical UI and rewriting it for Apple Lisa.
I wonder why Apple stole it's name from a piece of fruit ?
How many ways are there to go from "here to there"? I'd think any translation implementation between those two endpoints would have to be similar.
It's about Google and Limitnone... What a bunch o MacMorons...