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James Fallows

James Fallows - James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, will be published in May.
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James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His two most recent books, Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009), are based on his writings for The Atlantic; he is at work on another book about China. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.

Fallows welcomes and frequently quotes from reader mail sent via the "Email" button below. Unless you specify otherwise, we consider any incoming mail available for possible quotation -- but not with the sender's real name unless you explicitly state that it may be used. If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a "Comments" field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.
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Xobni's side of the story

By James Fallows

Mar 30 2009, 10:59 PM ET

In response to this report of problems that my colleague Corby Kummer encountered when installing the Outlook-indexing program Xobni, the CEO of Xobni, Jeff Bonforte, sent me a note. I post it here with his permission.
Thank you for your posts about Xobni. We were disappointed to read about Corby Kummer's bad experience with our product. We take performance and stability of our software very seriously and have spent over 5 months working out bugs and optimizing speed prior to releasing the product from beta. After 2M+ downloads, we are unaware of any user that has experienced Corby's issue.

We have reached out to Corby directly, but in the meantime we have begun researching the issue. At this point we don't believe that Xobni itself caused his issue. Instead, we believe when he installed Xobni (any software in this case), it triggered a rare Windows bug or registry corruption. Of course, we don't rule out the issue is with Xobni, but it seems likely it is a Windows bug similar to this Window's RSL (registry size limit) issue (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/189119).

Regardless, it is a bad issue, and even if Xobni is uninstalled, we want to make sure it is fully resolved. We will coordinate with Microsoft support. Though Corby had a bad experience, I hope you will give the new Xobni a try, like thousands of new users each day.

You are welcome to reach out to us, even on Twitter (@Xobni), to tell us about your experiences. We have had incredibly positive feedback so far like that from your colleague Barry Simon. If any of your readers encounter a dramatic issue, please feel free to have them contact Xobni support or me directly.

Thanks again,
Jeff Bonforte
jeff at xobni dot com
CEO, Xobni
PS: You can also tell Barry we are working on some more advanced search options that should please him.
While waiting for Corby and the Xobni people to get to the bottom of this issue, I have to say that the prompt, helpful, and, in the circumstances, very good natured response by a CEO is impressive. (And is the opposite of the blustering defensiveness I often marvel at in China.) When I'm able to download the program, I'll know more about how it works for me.



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