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Now, I'm a big fan of Thunderbird, but I do wonder where Mozilla is going with it. Hiving off messaging hasn't worked, so the organisation needs to come up with a new strategy in this sector.
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Just over three years ago, Mozilla made an interesting move:
Today we’ve announced the launch of Mozilla Messaging, the new name for the entity I’ve been calling MailCo on this blog. As promised, it’s a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, focused on email and internet communications.
Spinning out Thunderbird and email-related work was based on a premise:
Email is more important than ever, and yet it’s no longer the only game in town, or even the dominant one for younger generations or emerging economies. It is worthwhile considering what the right user experience could be for someone using multiple email addresses, multiple instant messaging systems, IRC, reading and writing on blogs, using VoIP, SMS, and the like. What parts of those interactions make sense to integrate, and where? I don’t believe that stuffing all of those communication models inside of one application is the right answer. But the walled gardens that we’re faced with today aren’t the right answer either. There is room for innovation and progress here, and we need to facilitate it.
The problem is that email isn't more important than ever: it's increasingly being displaced by those other things mentioned above. Indeed, for those “younger generations”, I think email is pretty much dead. Full Story |
