Slashdot Mirror
Mulberry Creators File for Bankruptcy
kRemit writes "Isamet/Cyrusoft International, the producer of the much-beloved email app Mulberry, has announced on its website that it has filed for liquidation under Title 11, Chapter 7. On a sidenote, Mulberry-mastermind Cyrus Daboo doesn't think it will be possible to release the source, because of third party implications and the overall complexity of the program. Also, there's already plenty of open source mail apps around. Goodbye, it was great while it lasted."
Never heard of it.
I used to use Mulberry as it was frankly the fastest and best IMAP client ever. Even today Thunderbird, Apple's Mail, and anything else just doesn't compete. Not even close.
Mulberry's biggest failing was its user interface which was too hardcore and too unweildly. I think they greatly improved this in the end, but by then it was too late.
I used Mulberry for many years. Sadly the last time was also several years ago.
That was my first reaction. I've never heard of this much-beloved email app, and I don't live in a world of just Outlook and Outlook Express.
So?
Cut the third party stuff out, and drop the messy endresult into our lap.
Let's see what we can do with it, even if it's just learning something new!
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
That's the most retarded comment I've ever read.
And this is right after the new thunderbird 1.0.7 announcement. I never personally used Mulberry myself but it warms me to see opensource thriving so well in areas where everybody needs the applications (as opposed to extremely niche apps).
" Also, there's already plenty of open source mail apps around. Goodbye, it was great while it lasted.""
Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the future of "software as a product". Hello to "software as a service". Oh wait!
I've seen several copy-paste trolls which were much more so.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I'd never heard of it until I saw this story. Their website seems to be devoid of much information now.
A Google Image Search shows a pretty interesting-looking client, and seems to show it running on Windows, MacOS, and what I presume to be a *nix variation of some form.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Cheers,
Ian
..producer of the much-beloved email app Mulberry..
Much beloved? I've never heard of it. I wonder what's so special about it? No wonder they went bankrupt if you ask me, I'd say the market for mailclients is (a) rather saturated (plus, every OS already includes at least a halfway decent free-as-in-beer client anyway), and (b) more and more people switch to webmail clients, such as gmail and the like.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Remind me not to trust you with anything.
What the hell are you talking about? You can't [b]pay[/b] to bankrupt someone.
Bankruptcy is what a person / company declares for itself when it no longer has enough money to pay what it owes to other people.
Unless you're saying that other companies with more money bankrupted Cyrusoft by producing better products and taking away their customers, in which case...that's the way it should be.
This space intentionally left blank.
"much-beloved" huh? That's some tough loving...
Support alternatives to Paypal: http://www.e-gold.com
I'd heard very good things about it for a while and decided to check it out. It crashed hard on Fedora. And the interface was... well, pretty sad. But by most accounts, it was, indeed, a very good IMAP client. Except the interface. And the crashing.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
Oh, and having the source wouldn't do anyone much good unless they planned on forever keeping it closed lest they find their asses sued.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
I've said it before: an app is more than a collection of features.
Having used Mulberry as a requirement here at school for the last 4 years, I have to say I am not sad to see it go. It looks like it would have been easier to use than it was, but our college's system admin customized the heck out of the "College Official" version so it could be used as a kiosk client ... and didn't bother to switch it for the individual students computers. No address book, no personal settings, a dictionary that was broken half of the time. I won't be shedding any tears to see this thing go.
I wasn't very encouraged when i tried the linux client last spring. I was willing to ignore the look (ah, the things we'll accept to use linux...) but the interface was also less than intuitive. Supposedly, it's internals were top-notch and so i hoped the front-end might catch up.
Then it crashed and i removed it.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
I mean, there exist many fast IMAP clients. Certainly Pine is fast, some (e.g. myself) find it very convenient, and it should be easy to recompile for OS X. It is not free software though.
More seriously, today's software market is such that selling a small app for money is not likely to be profitable. Too many people will write email clients, editors, OS kernels ... and give them away at no cost ("free as in beer"). Most of that software is actually Free Software (TM), but that's beside the point here. This is not dissimilar from the period in the 80s and early 90s when anytime someone would start selling a nice utility Microsoft would bundle similar functionality into DOS or Windows (anyone remember SideKick?). Today that means taht if your piece of software does something not too complicated, and many people would like to have this functionality, then someone will develop a free alternative. When it comes to web-browsing or e-mail reading, you have to content with massive efforts like the , which is even worse.
This is not to say there's room for commercial software today -- but it's in a different market. Since the cost of distributing software is now about zero, and the cost of writing it is effectively small (in the sense that many projects find many people are willing to donate their effots), to charge for software it must embody something more -- some kind of expensive research or expertise that is difficult to duplicate in a community project.
For example, GCC is a great cross-platform compiler, but if you need a good optimizing compiler you will pay for the real thing: 's ICC, or Sun's compilers. In a different field, there is little competition for AutoCAD.
I understand the third party implications with open sourcing it, but complexity? They've got to be kidding. There's office suites, entire operating systems, databases, and tons of other stuff that's probably way more complicated then their mail client. I think it's probably just that their code is so bad, that it's shameful for them to release it to the public.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"If I were bankrupted, I'd most definitely leak-out the source code through untraceable channel, just to show the banks and the other assholes who bankrupted me that their money doesn't mean that they can always have their own way.
Screw'em."
*rolls eyes*
Let's see. Who would have the source code? Why Mulberry of course. How does an "untracable channel" misdirect anyone investigating?
"just to show the banks and the other assholes who bankrupted me that their money doesn't mean that they can always have their own way."
They bankrupted you? What did they do? Not throw good money after bad? Nice to see that you're entitled to those "assholes" money.
"Screw'em."
Well no. Screw you. I suspect you'll find those "banks and assholes" need you less, than you need them.
Not Interesting
Not Insightfull
+ 5 Informative - you show that you can not be trusted to live up to your end of an agreement.
What! If those bastard banks hadn't kept demanding they pay back their loans, this never would have happened ('cause we know developers work for the sheer joy of writing code). I've watched Micheal Moore movies, I know banks don't make Republicans pay back loans, unless they're minorities.
It was a pretty nice IMAP client. I did find problems using the Solaris version where the windows all turned into empty grey boxes which never got resolved.
Every release seemed to bring bugfixes, a bunch of new features and a load of new bugs. It seemed like they never released a feature complete, stable and bug free version.
The Unix/Linux clients were built with a custom toolkit which looked out of place on every desktop. You couldn't even change the default grey colour of the UI to match whatever theme you were using.
Anyone got any suggestions for webmail replacments for silkymail?
The webclient, silkymail, was also by cyrusoft.
Looks like it was based on IMP.
well, guess some admin is going to have to download the dependencies and build it themselves, rather than a single package.
Not one comment that would show some compassion with the person who is subject in this -no doubt- personal tragedy.
Since their FTP server seems to be /.ed, here's a mirror of what I managed to pull down so far.
talking about the server, huh?
I've used Mulberry for years - it's one of the few clients that I can use in a sensible way to handle hundreds of emails per day.
What I'll miss is the multi-pane mode.
Every mail client (including Mulberry in later versions) supports the 3-pane mode where the list of folders is to the left, the list of messages is on the top and the message you're previewing/reading is on the bottom.
But with Mulberry, I can have a window with my folders on the left side of my screen, open up 4 folders at the same time, open up 7 different messages and cut/paste between them, start replying to one and go back and look through archives to find the point I wanted to make.... all in DIFFERENT windows.
What other client can offer me that (and disconnected IMAP, too)?
I for one am quite sad that this has happened. I have been a paying user of Mulberry for the past 4-5 years. It really was technically a great email client. The UI could have used some more work, but no other client could handle huge mailboxes anywhere close to as well as Mulberry could. I *really* hope they find a way to release the source for this product. I think with some UI reworking, it could be something truly great. Not to mention this is one of the only clients I've used that supports IMSP/ACAP, so that my mail preferences are the same wherever I go.
I am truly sad to see them disappear.
So no one else thinks that Mulberry is absolutely awful - slow, unwieldy, and obtuse? My university has been using Mulberry for years, and it's almost universally hated by students.
There is this absolutely fantastic car I know of... Well, except for the doors that open backwards, the solid orange windshield glass, the foot pedals located in the trunk and the fact that the steering wheel is square. Other than that, it's the swiftest car since, well, sliced bread!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I'll speak up here in defense of Mulberry. I've been using it since '99, and for all its flaws I still love it. The organization I work for has it deployed for about 500 users.
It's a bit of a two headed beast. On one hand it's an incredibly feature rich and customizable client, built using IMAP from the ground up. It supports POP3 and local mailboxes, but both are add ons to the IMAP core. It doesn't have the greatest GUI in the world, but it's simple, fast and powerful. The GUI is very close on Win/Mac/*nix which makes it very easy to support.
Now, that doesn't sound like a good email client for the masses, but the other side of Mulberry is the centralized IMSP preferences and the Admin toolkit.
An IMSP server for preferences and addressbooks allows users to have consistency between locations (home, offices, a co-worker's computer, labs) for all their settings and addressbooks. Sorta like a webmail solution, but much FASTER. IMSP options are inherited on the server, so you set up _your_ defaults for new users that make sense. You can also lock specific options to keep users from getting in trouble, or creating security problems.
The Admin Toolkit is what lets you take a copy of the Mulberry Application and customize it for your user base. Prevent creation of local mailboxes if you want, or keep users from saving their passwords so they actually remember what they are. Set attachment size limits or warnings, prevent the use of custom headers, or whatever.
I'm really not sure what we're going to do now that Cyrusoft/ISAMET is gone. Any other option is going to have a big support impact on out helpdesk.
-d
"I think it's probably just that their code is so bad, that it's shameful for them to release it to the public."
Ha! Have you look at the source of many open sourced projects lately? (Actually I get your point, but sometimes I think the difference between open and closed source programmers is that the former has enough confidence to allow someone else to look at their crappy code, not that one type of code is inherently worse than the other. In my experience, depending on the maintainer's outlook (particularly the, "If it works, use it" attitude), open source code can get quite a bit uglier with all the chefs in the kitchen.)
What I don't understand is why if you can't release as open source and the company's in bankruptcy that it automatically equals the death of the application. If he's in bankruptcy, doesn't he (or, I suppose more precisely, doesn't the fictious entity that is the company) sell off its goods? Seems like someone else buying the beast would be an option.
There's something in this story that's not quite making sense, however. Either the app's so rough that it's losing money now and there's nothing, given the state of the code, that anyone could do to fix it in a cost-effective manner, or the author's too attached to let anyhone else take a look and the company doesn't have any creditors. Or I suppose he may have already sold the rights to the code to his new fictious entity for a song before going belly-up and there's nothing left for this one to sell!
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
I'm a data packrat and a voracious reader, and subscribe to tons of mailing lists for all the open source daemons I use. I don't know of any other mail client (including Thunderbird) that can manage this load as effectively, while allowing me to keep the mail in folders on the server so that I can view it from both home and office.
I initially switched from Evolution to Mulberry because I wanted a system that allowed me to preserve my filtering rules when changing mail clients. The result was my use of procmail server-side to do all my filtering, and IMAP to allow any client from anywhere to access it. But when researching IMAP-capable clients, Mulberry stood out as the most capable. Only Mulberry can quickly check dozens of folders for new mail without subscribing to all of them. (It's also important to use a fast IMAP server. Dovecot is serving that purpose pretty well for my small server with a handful of clients.)
I've considered using Thunderbird, but so far I've been unable to get it to check all unsubscribed folders for new mail, even after setting the undocumented mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new to true. And it lacks Mulberry's novel separation of the concepts of identity and account.
Some have critized Mulberry's appearance on Linux, as if that was a show-stopper. For me, it's sufficient that it run at all on Linux, as I switch between Win32 and Linux platforms. I don't need it to fit some desktop theme for it to be useful. Eye candy is a nice-to-have, but not essential.
Stuff that matters? The fact that this has 70 comments after 4 hours on Slashdot's front page (hand half of those are people asking "WTF is Mulberry?") should be pretty indicative that this is not.
Seems like any application, no matter how obscure and unintuitive, gets a place on Slashdot's front page as long as it has a Mac version...
I have been an amazingly happy customer of Cyrusoft/Isamet for over 5 years (having paid for two upgrades). All of my friends know this as whenever the subject of email clients comes up, I priase Mulberry. I do not believe that there is ANY email client that can compare with it. Because of Mulberry I now have a requirements list for email clients that no other client can complete.
Some of thoses requirements are easy to handle. The big problem I have with most email clients is the lack of support for identities. Mulberry is unfortunately not a program for casual users. It is a program for people that wish to seriously get to know their email programs.
This is the downside they don't talk about very often when comparing the risks of using closed source to open source. And they don't even consider all the patent violations that may be occuring in closed source (which I think will come to light within the next 2-3 years when some lawyer finds the right language to make closed source reveal source code).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's good that we have a standard protocol that all mail clients can use to access all mail servers. It's good that the protocol is open and unencumbered. It's a shame, though, that the protocol we standardized on was IMAP.
:)
IMAP is an ugly, convoluted mess. And as I tend to rant about often, overly complex protocols encourage buggy implementations. "Keep it simple, stupid." If something like POP4 had become the standard, there would be a better selection of quality, non-troublesome email clients out there.
Although, with an increasing number of richly functional webmail systems out there now, perhaps the email fat client will become less relevant anyway. Of course, email clients will never go away entirely: you still need text-based access (pine and elm), and non-interactive clients such as Fetchmail...
Oh hell, I'll just come out and say it... anything is better than Outlook.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
While admittedly OSS has provided a variety of reasonable alternatives for simple mail clients, Mulberry seemed to provide the most complete implementation of IMAP functionality available. For me, even though I check my mail through pine, I needed to set up server-side SIEVE filters at my local installation using Mulberry, because there do not seem to be any reasonable alternatives.
A few months ago when I last looked, I found maybe two broken programs, one a project related to GNOME, and the other one an emacs extension that seemed to be outdated. Is there now any way to get SIEVE filters uploaded and written from *nix? It would be a plus if this could be done without learning the SIEVE filter language as well.
My school (the University of Virginia) uses Mulberry as its email client of choice (though they also offer a web client and you can set up Outlook or Thunderbird yourself). It is ugly and has a terrible user interface. The only good thing about it is that user profiles are stored server-side.
I know a bit about this. In former times I went on an annual IMAP pilgrimage, looking for a client that didn't suck the proverbial donkey balls, for Mac (and Linux, though that was hopeless in those days).
Mulberry was hella not it, although I tried out every new version as part of my quest.
Somebody said it was fast--that's true, if you happened to be connected directly to your mail server on a local gigabit ethernet link. Otherwise, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Mail.app, and Eudora were all faster (in their respective times). Plus a bunch of others.
In fact, the only true claim to fame Mulberry ever had was the undisputed title for the Worst Software Interface Of Any Mail Client (Or Perhaps Any Type Of Application) Ever. Even after the "interface overhaul" they did with those unpaid college students! (Not that I blame them: your average college kid was SURE to know more about human-computer interaction than Cyrusoft apparently ever did...)
Mulberry did have FEATURES though, which is why your average thinking user hated it even more. You always wanted to believe, because you wanted the 89,734 features it had--more than any other client ever, 'm pretty sure--but after a week (or maybe a day) of seeing the whole app modally lock up for ten minutes while checking mail, the disjointed and otherworldly user interface, the crashes, and the general 80's-ness of it, you went back to Thunderbird, Mail, or Outlook or whatever.
Goodbye Mulberry, and my condolences to the 9 poor slobs who will actually miss you. Software that sucks that bad shouldn't really take so long to die.
Mulberry looked reasonably capable (it supported my requirements: PGP/MIME, IMAP over SSL), but the UI had a strange look and feel to it. It didn't really suck, but it just felt .. oddly foreign, sorta like a Java or WINE program. I don't have any intellectual reason for saying that's a bad thing, but nevertheless, it rubbed me the wrong way.
And since it wasn't open, I could never be sure that it had a future and would get bugfixes. I wasn't averse to buying proprietary games (e.g. from Loki), but relying on mysterious and potentially-orphaned code seemed a bit dangerous for Internet-related client software that I would be using on a day-to-day basis. So I ended up using Sylpheed instead, and it has worked fine for the last 3 years. And now, it looks like my thoughts about getting orphaned have finally been justified.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Your criticim of IMAP would be more compelling with specific examples, as opposed to broad strokes like "it's too complex."
Not that I disagree with you, I would just like to see specific examples of where IMAP went wrong. Then readers could judge for themselves whether they agree with your conclusion that IMAP is a bad protocol.
... and almost on all points.
.dwg files natively, autocad addons and everything). There's a bunch of others really (SmartSketch, Graphite, LinuxCAD, VariCAD, Cycas, ...) including a lot of other well known/established ones (Solidworks, etc) and other specialized ones. Even QCad (for 2D stuff) surprised me. Lots of people nowadays are finding products that work better for them than CAD software too (like SmartDraw or Visio). There's never been so many cad programs out there, and (imho) there's less of a reason to stick to AutoCAD than ever. The only thing that keeps me using AutoCAD is because I already know it...
Microsoft in the 80/90's didn't really clone small utilities and bindle things quite like they are now. Only in it's recent versions you see things like built-in zip file support, a picture viewer (the "preview" - not paint), a fax client, a media player and all that stuff. They're getting into EVERYTHING lately, often making poor clones/copies/versions of it. They make software in just about every field: digital imaging, finances, encyclopedias, server stuff, office suites, programming, AV encoding/streaming/etc. Not to mention the hardware side: gaming consoles, PDAs and cell phones, rebranded hardware of all kinds. (And other stuff like search engines/portals/webmail...) 10 years ago there was dos, windows, office, visual studio and very little more. They've never been into so many fields at once, trying to take everybody's business, it's getting a bit scary...
AutoCAD, no alternatives? There's more alternatives to it than EVER. Intellicad is a well known one (uses
///<sig
First off, count me as one that hasn't heard much about this client (I knew it existed, but never actually tested it or reccomended it)...and I'm an e-mail server admin...
Now, as to what will actually happen to the source code...
It's pretty obvious that the source code to this app is probably their biggest asset...there are obviously still folks that use the app and I would say that the real reason they won't open source the app is that they really think that someone will eventually purchase it...who, I don't know...I would say Novell, but they already own Evolution...maybe RedHat or Mandrakesoft...Not to mention that the bank would be stupid to allow them to release freely what is likely to be their biggest asset (their source).
Now, if (as I suspect) this app has been sitting in obscurity for years, maybe it just needs to die...I mean, who would pay $40 (with shiping) for a mail client when there are so many free or cheap alteratives...
Where that "hate" coming from? All I see is a $35 shareware email client http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 3046
:)
It got 3.8 rating from Versiontracker users which is really hard to get.
What do you suggest for people needing its features or happy with the program? e.g. I use Eudora here on OS X and waiting for its Cocoa release to buy, should it die too?
Eh, Qualcomm at its back, a bit hard
what sad news.
Mulberry was and perhaps still is the best IMAP client out there. The only one left where you can have a seperate window for all your folders with email list/content and a seprate window for your folder tree.
Downside always was and is the horrible interface.
I would love to see this one in Thunderbird. Very sad that the source can't be released. Really really very sad.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
On the other hand, it did mail lists and shared mailboxes well. No other app did this as well as Mulberry. It also was a win for the Mac-Good/Windows-Bad zealots.
Running a unviersity tech support call center as I do, I (and my entire team) hated this program intensely. We hated how long it took to resolve a problem with it. We hated how long it took just to diagnose a problem with it. We hated how long it took to train an average customer to use it.
But what we hated most about it was that we had to keep supporting it solely to subsidize a handful of admins and advanced users. They liked it so much they went on personal PR crusades throughout the campus. Out of a total of 60,000 users, Mulberry was used by less than 3000 people in any calendar year. About 50 or so were fanatics, and the other 2950 had the misfortune to work in small departments whose local admin or tech were Mulberry fanatics. We support 8 email programs, for christ's sake. For years (because of an inside fanatics) we were listing Mulberry as the 'preferred' program. (This was before I got there.) Even so, it never rose above 3k users on its best day. That should tell you something.
Most of the people who were using it didn't need mail list management functionality, and they certainly don't care about Mac email client 'parity'. We were paying for Mulberry site licenses, subsidizing selfish choices. All in the name of a function that only 300 or so people actually needed as a requirement of their job or functions, and to farcically maintain a 'win' in the Mac app column. Better solutions for those 300 people could have been found, even if it meant we kept supporting it just for them or we did something in-house.
When the bankruptcy was announced, you could hear the cheering from two floors away. Mulberry was a symbol of what goes wrong when there isn't a standardized means of evaluating services/demands and when sys admins have too much unjustified, informal say over what we do/offer. This might be an unpopular thing to say here, but it's the damned truth in my small bit of the working world.
j.b.
Ps. this is just about the client. We never used their server software.
We use it, and i have to support it for a department at our University.
It sucks.
It has every feature you could every hope for, but has so many quirks that everyone (even those we could call 'advance IT users') found it annoying to use. Many aspects of the interface were just strange, which could make day to day slow, and support calls frequent. i'm glad to see it go.
Its good points: Good IMAP support. It supported server-side settings and addressbook. This is a godsend in somewhere like a University. A user can log in to any PC with Mulberry installed (pointing at our servers) and login, where they would get their settings, addressbook, etc. Compare that to Outlook Express, or - I hate to say it - thunderbird[1], where settings are saved in the profile[2] or local machine.
to pre-empt..
[1] yes, i'm sure there is a way to save settings on a (LDAP) server with thunderbird, but there seems to be little support for this, though the thunderbird wiki makes mentions of future plans
[2] yes Windows roaming profiles allow settings to move with the user, unless they log on to a home PC, or a PC not in that Domain, or a MAC, or a laptop, etc.
You will forget this sig before you next see it
Hi. I wanted to post a few comments here to try to explain a few things but also to provide some thanks where thanks is due. I no longer have any official connection to Mulberry/Cyrusoft (other than holding worthless stock), but was the company co-founder, worked for it for quite a while, and until towards the end was on the board. So these are just my personal opinions here, but not completely uninformed ones.
First and foremost, I want to tell the community what you probably know already: Cyrus Daboo is a complete mensch. He's one of the great people I've run into in twenty years (gasp) working on internet foo, and that includes quite a long list of great people out of the IETF and messaging communities. He's an incredibly smart and dedicated guy, utterly gentlemanly, honest, sincere, dedicated, and visionary, and if you're reading this and are in the messaging industry, you should be on the phone right now trying to hire him.
I'm the first one to say we made quite a few mistakes along the way, but we hung on for nearly ten years largely because Cyrus was doggedly loyal to our customers and users. We spent the last five years really struggling both financially and technically in a large part because he refused to walk away from the people who had spent time and money on our vision and product. Love it, hate it, or somewhere in the middle, we remained in business because the people who started it felt obliged to support the people who depended on us. Loyalty is always a two-way street, and always and only earned.
As I said: we made mistakes. Boy howdy. We know that. But I am proud the company hung on as long as it could, and I do hope that it was of service to the people who did like it. There was a strong vision underlying the effort, and insofar as many parts of that vision have become a reality, we had some success. I hope that y'all will remember and respect that effort when the dust is all settled.
You know the old saying: failure is an orphan, success has many progenitors. No point in hashing over all the reasons why we finally went under, but I will simply say that Mulberry was not the problem from a business standpoint. Without other business entanglements, it was earning sufficient revenue to be self-sufficient and make a little profit. So, warts and all, even as a niche product, it would've remained viable had the company not had other financial constraints on it. I want to underscore that: Mulberry was, by itself, profitable. Whether the bankruptcy trustees will be able to do anything with it, I have utterly no idea.
Times have changed since 1995. There were a couple of dozen people at the first two IMAP conferences, maybe 100 at the official "second" IMAP meeting in 1996 at the University of Washington, which is where I met Cyrus for the first time. We all learn by experience, rough consensus, and running code, and I was constantly impressed by Cyrus' ability to produce all three. How many people do you know in the industry who've stuck with something for a decade?
Did we stick with it too long, in the face of market competition, our features being liberally raided by other clients, open source, and so forth? Probably. But for those of you who were there ten years ago know how hard it was to sell the vision of ubiquitous mail access, centralized storage, mobile metapreferences, extensible protocols, strong secure administration, open standards, and yes, even the basic transport protocols themselves back then. I won't name names, but the biggest players in the space now were skeptical or downright hostile to the basic ideas everybody takes for granted now. We undertook the enterprise at a time when there were very, very few commercial efforts in this space and only a small handful that were truly committed to open standards. It was probably a dumb, Don Quixote-esque quest if we look at it with the hindsight of our bank balances as goggles. But I honestly think our efforts made a difference, and if the underlying vision has not been completely fulfilled, I don't think