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Mozilla Opens Thunderbird Email Subsidiary
alphadogg is one of several readers to note the opening of the Mozilla Foundation's new subsidiary, Mozilla Messaging, charged with developing the free, open source Thunderbird email software. Mozilla Messaging will initially focus on Thunderbird 3, which aims at improving several aspects of the software, including integrated calendaring and better search. ZDNet UK's coverage leads with the interest the new organization has in developing instant-messaging software.
Will the calendar work with exchange?
Let's just hope it takes a more sober, considered and ethical approach to life than its wayward cousin... the whole Mozilla project seems to be a little too 'Yurpeen' for my tastes.
The CEO of this new Mozilla Messaging company writes the most insightful blog post containing the most hopeful look at the future of messaging and how Thunderbird could make a difference there... and slashdot links to mostly useless informationweek and zdnet stories?? Bleh...
David Ascher really gives me hope for where things are going - but he can't do it alone. And he can't get the people who'd help to do so if he's being ignored!
of life.
... something.
He'll still get attention - and you get bucket loads of slashdot karma. It's a win
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Rofl, like the folks concerned would see them. Anyway, what would be nice would be an effective filtering mechanism for Usenet groups. I try to use the current filtering system in Thunderbird and it just sucks all kinds of ass. I'd also love to see a way to rescind filtering and accidentally killed threads.
Yeah, I know, wishful thinking, good luck.
All these stories about open source software seem to be joining in a symphony that is ringing a death knoll for MS.
I guess not everything needs to be a MS killer, but where will they be once jabber based instant messaging, calDAV calendaring, and SSL IMAP are commonplace, easily integrated, federated and administered?
What FireFox did to their web dominance, these open protocols, standards and software will do to the rest of their business. (Embarrass and decimate.)
What advantages will Exchange have over a system that integrates and works nicely on a dozen different hardware devices, from servers to phones, without having to pay MS a single dollar?
Sure they'll still have their Visual Studio and Office, but boy they'll be crying over how much money they should/could have been making.
Consider their failures:
-XBox
-XBox 360 (May be early to call it a complete failure, but now that HD-DVD is dead, sony will ride them like a reverse cowgirl)
-Live? wtf?
-MSN Search
-Windows Mobile
They are truly stuck in a rut, a rut that seems to be getting deeper and deeper. (I should add...Thanks to Linux, Mozilla, FOSS, open-ness in general and other ideas that MS simply can't comprehend.)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I would like to see a search capability like that in the defunct Bloomba e-mail client (now the basis of WordPerfect Mail). The entire text of every piece of mail was indexed which made searches very fast. It was also easy to set up virtual folders (based on search criteria) to associate your e-mail according to several criteria. A given mail could appear in several folders, not just one. The company called it a Personal Content Database. The Bloomba client also incorporated a calendar and an anti-spam proxy.
The company producing the software, Stata Labs, sold the technology to Yahoo in 2004. It has since been resold to Corel for use in their WordPerfect Mail.
Never let reality temper imagination
Never let reality temper imagination
Email is not what people are after. Dopn't get me wrong, people want to send and receive email. That's a no brainer, but, there are a myriad to clients out there that do the job quite well. Some of the clients are stand-alone and some are web based.
Some of the clients also offer a "calendar" where you can store events.
However, what the world needs (to avoid Microsoft's dominance) is a shared calendaring system integrated into the same email client. I use Outlook at work. At the end of the day, I care nothing what I use to send emails with, but I do care that I can view others' calendars in Outlook, and that I can send them invites and see if they've got something in the calendar or not. That is what many people are looking for, not another email client.
This will never happen on the client side if there is no server backend to manage the data and the sharing permissions.
If you build it, people will come.
My two cents.
I think that the IM market is already quite flooded with competitors (competing protocols and competing unofficial multi-protocol clients). The most intelligent thing for Mozilla to do is perhaps build its own @mozillamail.com email system (or similar domain) with easy Thunderbird integration and integrate it with an XMPP client/server. XMPP is the way to go these days. In that way, folks who already have XMPP accounts (Livejournal users, Gmail users, and soon AIM users) can contact those using the Mozilla Mail service.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
another obscure IM client with a neurotic-friendly GUI will catch on in all the heavily saturated markets.
Until it will sync calendar and contacts with my cell phone. Until then I'm joined at the hip to MS and Outlook.
Personally, what I'd like to see is an e-mail client that comes by default with working encryption... that is to say, it tells other e-mail clients what encryption choices it offers and learns from messages it receives and always chooses the best encryption option when sending messages to others. Further, I'd like that choice to handle when I send a message to a CC list of 30 people, such that it will send messages to all users, some encrypted and some not, but still letting all users get the full CC list for responses. Ideally I'd like to see this built upon an open standard that has buy in not only from the Thunderbird team, but also other major vendors (IBM, Sun, Apple, etc.) as well as other types of software (IM, VoIP, video conferencing, etc.)
Seriously, in this day and age doesn't ist seem idiotic that easy to use encryption is not a built in feature for most e-mail clients? I know why Google hasn't done this (they have a conflict of interest) but what have e-mail software vendors been doing for the last 5 years? How is it possible that someone like Apple hasn't jumped on this and made a snarky advert where the "Mac guy" says, "Oh really, I put my mail in envelopes so random strangers and people at the post office can't read the letters I send to my bank and girlfriend."
Are the Qualcomm developers who support Penelope part of this? Will their work be incorporated into Thunderbird, or is it a separate project?
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
After Qualcomm got out of the e-mail client business and handed Eudora over to Mozilla, I wish that the Mozilla folks would just enhance the Eudora program - like they were "supposed to do." Whine-ingly
Thunderbird is a great email client, but I've never seen an open source IM client that's adequately compatible with "the big four", ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and AIM. Trillian does it quite well, they are adding more and more compatibility with the alpha.
Is there a reason the guys at Cerulean can do IM so well where the open source community hasn't to date?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Lightning supports both WebDAV and CalDAV, which allow calendar sharing. It plays with google calendar & Apple's iCal. It just doesn't play with Outlook/Exchange.
Evolution works with exchange, as does MS's Outlook Web Access.
Having just solved an enigmatic Microsoft Exchange problem that even their own support "specialists" could not assist with, I really hope this is the light at the end of the tunnel for a centralized messaging/calendering platform. Keep it simple, keep it safe. My god, my bosses spend thousands of dollars each year for platform licenses, upgrades and my labor, just to keep the ugly monster that is "groupware" running. All for just a synchronized calendering and email program so the managers can share their agendas without headaches. Assuming that is ALL they use their Outlook clients for, is it the server backend really that complicated to develop? Why is it 2008 and the only other alternatives that I could possibly levee the executives for is IBM and Novell? Until a low-cost or free competitive alternative appears that is stable and reasonably straight-forward to troubleshoot, it sometimes hard not to suspect the industry of committing pseudo Programmed Obsolesce.
"I drank what?" -Socrates
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -Mark Twain
I'd like to see an email client that hooked into all of these social networking sites that I use and aggregate the messages from those. I have a few friends that only got email accounts to join Facebook and MySpace (say what you want). My personal email relies much more on contact with web pages than actual "direct" email. Don't get me started with SMS messages (no, the phone kind not the M$ abomination).
I think it is a generational thing but soon email clients will go the way of the milkman, unless some smart company was to bridge the two.
The Mozilla Foundation has the money, bit I like the KDE applications better. Kmail beats Thunderbird by far - and the rest of the kde-pim applications are pretty well developed. Could the Mozilla Foundation join forces with KDE? there are many, many challenges. For example there is an urgend need for an appication that synchronizes with your online calendar and your cell phone. KDE applications could use somthing like Linkification and severals other Mozilla addons, Mozilla needs help in evrythin which is not a browser.
"ZDNet UK's coverage leads with the interest the new organization has in developing instant-messaging software."
:p
Yeah, because thats really what we need right now, yet ANOTHER IM protocol/app.
XMPP is king, upgrade your clients accordingly.
If Mozilla want to do something useful, they should develop a Evolution server suite, which should be AS EASY TO USE and as powerful as Exchange, and I mean GUI's for the 90% of sysadmins who don't want to spend years reading manpages and breaking config files. Then you'll really see Evolution Client adoption in businesses.
The open source movement could have real potential if there where more collaboration between projects. This I feel will always be a thorn in the side of the OS movement, as collaboration is MUCH easier in person and with money to throw at problems. It'd be great to see some projects forking to try some collaborations. Like a uber-groupware package
People ultimately choose Microsoft software because everything comes neatly packaged, and slots together wonderfully easily for a beginner. Exchange working with Active Directory, and Office on the client machines, is very easy to set up and maintain, they work together in harmony, and by and large, it doesn't break. People and monopoly commissions bitch constantly about Microsoft's reluctance to open its protocols, to allow similar interoperability with other systems, but the best way to beat them, is to provide to decent competition.
Compare this to a Linux setup. You'll need to download many different packages, and glue them together with config files to get a comparable setup. Even then, lets face it, working with config files, and with Linux setup in general is nothing like as intuitive as the Microsoft experience. (Don't take from this that I don't like Linux, far from it, it is my OS of choice, but it simply doesn't appeal to non techies)
That is all.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
A lot of people use the example of Exchange Server as a reason that open source will not displace MS in the business world. They like to point out that no open source program interfaces properly with its calendaring function, damning all these clients to hobbyist hell. It has become an obsession.
However, I think that in trying to emulate outlook in this respect, open source projects such as thunderbird have lost the innovative edge that other OSS projects have. I am convinced that Exchange Server is as good as dead and google docs is going to kill it. Google docs does everything that Exchange Server does, and it is in many respects better. It is innovative (labeling, for example), and most importantly, you don't need a client of any kind to use it. Just a web browser and there is no client side configuration at all. From an IT side, it is certainly easier to deploy and manage than Exchange server. Google already offers domain accounts for free, I think at least in part to prevent small and growing businesses from getting hooked on Exchange in the first place.
I bet that in the near future google is going to start selling the software that runs google docs for clients to run on their own servers. I would also bet that they will develop Exchange Server migration tools soon.
However, there is no reason why an open source project could not have done this. In the arena of website content management systems, open source projects such as TYPO3, Joomla! and phpwebsite are the leaders because instead of trying to emulate Microsoft Frontpage, they came up with good, innovative solutions oriented toward real people. Similarly, SugarCRM and phpBMS are leaders in small to medium business client management systems for the same reason: instead of emulating Microsoft Access, they are innovative, powerful, easily managed web-based solutions. None of these projects are less ambitious than google docs.
In getting so hung up on the question you just posed, we are going to see yet another generation of Outlook clones that will never be as good as Outlook because the open source developers cannot take the Exchange Server apart like Outlook developers can. We should stop asking that question and start asking what we can do to make that question irrelevant.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
The reason that Microsoft has such a stronghold in certain markets is they have vendor lock in.
Office formats in the past weren't easily usable with other office suites.
Exchange server doesn't work with other email clients without a plug in. (this is for the extra stuff such as calender in outlook)
MSN messenger would not be easy to bring over to the jabber platform for the simple reason that Microsoft decided it would be a good idea to use users email addresses as users login names. Try explaining to a user why they need another @example ontop of their login. End user confusing yes.
The live services. Is one of the most confusing branding methods. Is it for the xbox is it a messaging platform? It's more of a umbrella brand that includes everything.
Windows mobile, I don't know how they got that on so many mobiles other then at the time people wanted features that other operating systems didn't offer (Palm, Symbian.) Hopefully there will be more choice once Android hits (which I really like, it does things right for a mobile platform)
So will Microsoft go away as soon as we would like. Well no unfortunately but the options of replacement have been good and are eating away at Microsoft's once empire. This discussion could go on for a long time as to what is vendor locked in or why people keep going with a broken methodology.
They (the people) don't know better, and Microsoft takes advantage of that. That's what I attribute most of it too.
The two things that keep me using gmail:
- Grouping related emails into conversations
- Unobtrusive chat built-in
I don't use chat enough to remember to start up MSN or AIM or whatever when I'm at the computer. But I'll chat occasionally on gmail because it's always open if I'm at my computer anyway.
Put those two things into Thunderbird and I'll use it.
So with there being no mention of the Eudora code base that Qualcomm gave to the Mozilla folks, does this mean there are no plans for those features in Thunderbird? Does Eudora only have implications for the Penelope project?
I think it would be a shame if all we got out of Qualcomm's Eudora are some very superficial changes (new buttons, etc). Then again, maybe I have an overly rosey memory of Eudora and it really didn't have much to contribute.
While I have my little soap-box, how come Thunderbird doesn't start off with a Junk email folder so that I can mark something as Junk and have it go to that folder? Apparently, there are people out there who don't get Junk email!
How about not losing e-mail as a priority for Thunderbird 3.0? Or an automated backup system? I've had Thunderbird lose all my e-mail randomly, the profile became corrupted and there was no easy way to retrieve it.. (Which is why I use IMAP now.. =) )
-Myke
You might want to try Citadel, which has integrated email, group conversations and shared calendaring.
Allow me - again - to propose a moratorium on all "Microsoft is dying" posts until all the following conditions are met:
1 MS stops reporting 15%-20% growth each quarter.
2 MS stops reporting 30% growth in "emerging markets," 20% growth in the EU and 15% growth in the U.S.
3 MS no longer has the energy or the resources to underwrite projects such as the design and launch of a communications satellite for Africa. Microsoft plans comms satellite for Africa
4 MS stops paying dividends.
5 MS no longer holds $20 billion - $30 billion - $40 billion in cash.
6 MS begins borrowing money to meet its expenses - not to finance a takeover of Yahoo!
I went trolling Mozilla.Com for Thunderbird development info (roadmaps, release date projections) recently and found it startlingly bare in terms of Thunderbird related material.
Basic functionality works pretty well, but the editor is braindead, especially when it comes to switching back and forth between HTML/Plain Text edits.
And there needs to be some more options/tuning of the IMAP engine. First off, 5 connections as the default is broken, and I'd like to see IMAP locks get broken and stay broken by other IMAP client access. Thunderbird tends to hang on to them which makes other client access (eg, remote) go read-only, which sucks when your pocket vibrates with "new" mail Thunderbird has conveniently re-marked "unread". Outlook Express does this better.
I'd also like to see the reading pane status selectable per account (eg, on for news, off for email).
But development seems pretty bare.
Yes, RSS.... not the same as a client that is integrated with these social sites. A single place where not only can the user view "notes" but also reply to them.
My point was that social sites are growing, becoming more important and mainstream. One day such sites will overtake email, which is full of SPAM, Phishing and other concerns. Yes, RSS is nice... but not even close.
Oh yeah, corporate email? I'd bet 90% out there are Outlook and maybe 90% of those are Exchange backended. Thunderbird will not make inroads there with dwindling corporate support for POP3 and IMAP4 for the sake of the bastard Exchange protocol. Many corporate responses to Outlook alternative requests is to have the users go with "OWA" (intentionally broken on Firefox).
I would use a stand-alone mail client that could aggregate and allow me to use the social sites I frequent. Other than that I have no time, fire up firefox with 4 default tabs up.
Currently the only reason I need to run Windows on my work laptop is MS Office, especially Outlook working with Exchange. I have a Linux workstation that I use for almost everything, the only reason I have to have to take my laptop out of the bag is for mail and calender. I have tried Evolution, and I find it to be very clunky and jerky.
That's what kvm is for.
Including sit physically secure in my server room? I hate Exchange too, and also think email clients should stick to email instead of adding the kitchen sink, but Google isn't going to kill MS until people can have control over the hardware it runs on.
Exchange isn't going to die anytime soon. No matter how good Google Aps is, no one with half a brain and a medium to large buisness.. is going to give Google power over their email severs. Too many sensitive documents go out and come in, through email. No one wants someone else to have power over their business by controlling access to those documents. Sure, we geeks can tout it as a triumph of innovation or whatever the buzz word is this week, but you'll never see google aps as a replacement for Exchange and Outlook. And those two products really should be called one product, because its not till you put them together that either really shines. Its a symbiotic relationship. You can't build a better open source exchange server and have it succeed without a better open source version of outlook. Want to see Exchange die? Lock the writers of Qmail and Thunderbird in a room for a few months, and keep delivering them beer and pizza through a mail slot.
I know it was a bit long, but if you're going to reply you could at least read the whole post.
I bet that in the near future google is going to start selling the software that runs google docs for clients to run on their own servers.Even if they don't do this, a lot of users (especially smaller businesses without dedicated IT staff) would prefer not to be responsible for the hardware, anyway. Larger ones not so much.
Personally I think it's more likely they'll sell hardware which runs their software, similar to the Google Mini search appliance. Or perhaps even add the functionality to Google Mini: a box that costs a few grand that can index just about all your data and hosts your email and calendar. That'd be a pretty compelling offering for people starting up businesses.
How about email archiving abilities built into Thunderbird? That would be nice. I use Thunderbird for my mailing list account. I get a couple thousand messages a day and I never delete mail. Archiving options would be nice.
By far the absolute biggest, largest, most grand and lacking feature is the ability to store Thunderbird settings on the damn server so I can fire up Thunderbird from multiple locations and still have full access to my configured filters. Please!!! I would pay good money for that feature.
In the January W3Schools OS Platform Stats Vista is poised to overtake OSX and Linux combined in a month or two.
It could take a little longer, but that scarcely matters.
The trend line for Linux is as flat as the Dakota prairies. 1% growth client-side in five years.
The Net Applications stats you quote show Linux with a 0.67% market share. Pretty much where the Intel exec would place it.
To experience the Year of Linux. the geek needs a time warp, suspended animation. He needs to be revived as "Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century."
Obviously, technical superiority and free-ness are not good enough reasons to get everyone to switch over
It is time the geek stopped looking for easy answers in catch phrases like "lock-in," or "convicted monopolist." If his world is defined by a conflict between the cathedral and the bazaar, why is it that Microsoft is so successful on the street?
It is time the geek stopped looking for a government bail-out.
Whether from the bureaucracy of the EU - where Microsoft pays its hundred million dollar fines and still sees 20% growth - or from the African education minister who is expected to pick up the tab for one million XO laptops.
Microsoft built its empire from the ground-up. Too often the geek builds top-down. He thinks in terms of the enterprise distribution - the government mandate - that will magically drive small business and home users to Linux.
I was an avid Thunderbird user, have been for a long time. But then I transfered all my email to Google apps (GMail). I tried the web interface... and found myself using it more and more often, until eventually I realized I hadn't used Thunderbird for 1-2 months. So I installed the Gmail and Google calendar provider into Thunderbird thinking I might use it more... and I did at first... but then I found myself back in the web interface more often than not. To me the email client is no longer a concern, unless I plan to travel and need offline access I can't imagine myself using anything but the web interface to GMail if I am online (which more and more is the case).
I happen to be one of the unfortunate masses whose employer insists on MS Exchange for all its scheduling needs. Since I work on a linux box, this is a constant source of frustration. My day job will become noticeably easier if the OpenChange project yields a solid and reasonably featured open source Exchange client.
Thunderbird has no revenue source. Without help from the profit generated by Firefox (primarily from Google), Thunderbird is doomed, at least in terms of centrally paying people to develop it.
It's been cast off to fend for itself. I'd expected a more altruistic attitude from an organization calling itself "The Mozilla Foundation," and am rather disappointed by this change.
Kid-proof tablet..
> Lock the writers of Qmail and Thunderbird in a room for a few months, and
> keep delivering them beer and pizza through a mail slot.
You insensitive clod! You've taken care of the I and forgotten the O. Ewwww!
The PC is the mainframe... The people worrying about MS Exchange are like mainframe developers predicting or worrying about some obscure business application. It's irrelevant. You're 3, 5 years behind the times already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(mobile_phone_platform)
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS8591201260.html
http://www.symbian.com/phones/index.html
This is the now, not the future, Microsoft have already lost, and they have admitted it. All their Windows mobile devices?
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/pocketpc/default.mspx?curPg=All
Almost all, industrial applications.
Deleted
i fear that its being attacked from the wrong end.
whats needed isnt so much a new client that can integrate 1001 different protocols, but a server that can do so, and that one can connect to using any interface out there.
as in, a one stop shop online for mail, im, chat and whatsnot. hell, if one could merge mail, im and chat into a single protocol one would be half way there. and with the recent extensions to xmpp it may well happen.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Quote: "A lot of people use the example of Exchange Server as a reason that open source will not displace MS in the business world."
The reason it isn't working is because there are too many open-source exchange like projects. Therefore, none of them gets all of the features which are needed.
To succeed, they should bundle all forces and create ONE solution.
When we were looking for a Groupware solution, I have tried several open source solutions.
They all failed in one of the following:
- Open source Outlook connector isn't working properly;
- PDA synchronization is poor (of doesn't support a lot of devices);
- No windows client exists;
- Features were missing.
In the end, they all failed the pilot.
So we ended up with Novell Groupwise (through Novell Open Workgroup suite), which I have become a great fan of. It also made me see the immaturity of the open source projects.
Groupwise includes -any- feature our users are asking for, while the open source solutions lacked a lot of things.
Also, with Groupwise Mobile Server it is possible to synchronize mail, contacts, appointments with any smartphone over GPRS. (A feature we are using very intensively, since it's actually a complete blackberry alternative for no additional cost)
If you look at the development model of Groupwise you can clearly see why open source can't succeed.
For one, Groupwise has been developed for at least 10 years.
Also, Novell purchases all kinds of company's or additional products to quickly add a lot of extra features in the standard package they sell.
Since the open source movement has to develop everything themselves and didn't have such a large head-start, it is almost impossible for them to succeed.
I still know the days we were talking about a 1% market share of firefox.
Then people started to talk about 5% and later 10%
Today it's on 15% (perhaps more?) already, which is quite a lot. And virtually any website created today supports firefox correctly.
Also, back in the days MS had about 99% of the OS market, now I see you mentioning 90%.
Not even to mention the server market, in which Linux is making some very good progress.
10+ years ago when I started working with Linux nobody even knew what it was. Today a lot of (non-tech) people know what Linux is, so that is some real progress.
Don't forget the fact that the numbers start growing more and more rapidly as the market share increases.
If the current trend progresses in about 10 years we'll be at around 50% or something. (Please correct me if I'm wrong)
I'm old fashioned, and have always used a mail client rather than web mail where possible as I like having a rich editing environment. In recent years I have moved to IMAP mail wherever I can in order to be able to at least read my mail pretty much anywhere. Thunderbird (and Firefox)'s OS portability has made it possible to have a common mail interface on practically any computer, but what is still missing, as has been said elsewhere, is a common environment. This is where Gmail et al (but mostly GMail) has the advantage: it can be run practically anywhere that there is a web browser and Internet access. Now that Gmail has POP3 and IMAP access it can be integrated into Thunderbird. Similarly there is at least one application (for OS X at the moment - it's called Mailplane) that integrates Gmail with the desktop and hooks into iPhoto, iTunes, Growl and the other things that make OS X a cool working environment. A lot of these things are probably available as extensions for Thunderbird.
The gap is physical portability: for me, the ability to open Thunderbird on any machine and retrieve your environment, or indeed, have a Thunderbird-like experience (terrible phrase) through a web browser would be very valuable. Thunderbird has a common configuration format that can be read across a WAN all ready, and it seems to me that that could be extended across the Internet in a relatively trivial way, and could be applied to a web browser interface in the same way: there could also be an option for offline configuration storage on a USB key or similar. There would be a public network and the option to have private servers (free software of course, with paid support) that could either be internal or Internet facing. The aim would be for Thunderbird to become a genuinely portable communications environment that would provide an alternative to or even a complement for Exchange or Lotus Notes while using FOSS components.
Hopefully this will mean that some /actual/ progress will be made on Thunderbird. I've been using it for years and I do like it, but the Lightening calendar add on is terrible, and it lacks some 'nice to have' features.
As to those who've lost their email due to corrupted files... this happens to Outlook too. Just write a batch script to backup your mail folder once in a while. Problem solved.
And no, Gmail is not a viable alternative to a desktop mail client. Don't get me wrong, I think Google's services are great and I use Gmail for somethings, but having your entire email universe in Google's hands is foolish.
Anyway, I hope this announcement will mean some major upgrades to T bird and soon.
These kind of %100 percentages are useless for such situations. Instead, software domination works with thresholds. There is no 50-50% situation. At some point (20%?) the threshold is crossed and people start to know many people who use the other thing and over a month the 20-80 situation has flipped to a 90-10 situation.
So the linear percentage metric is misleading. More useful would be a metric of thresholds and flipp over points. Which doesn't exist. But don't worry, when the flip happens, we'll use 90-10 percentages against MS.
" but Google isn't going to kill MS until people can have control over the hardware it runs on."
This appears to assume that people assume their own "in house" technical people are going to do a better job of looking after their data than Google would. I'm not sure how many people would bet on their own geeks vs Google geeks.
" I am convinced that Exchange Server is as good as dead and google docs is going to kill it."
Nope. Those of us constrained by HIPAA (and SOX, I suppose - never had to deal with that) won't be letting confidential information outside of our firewall.
"I bet that in the near future google is going to start selling the software that runs google docs for clients to run on their own servers."
We're currently in a migration project from Lotus Notes to Exchange. It's been going on for over a year and will take at least another 6 (hah!) months. Large enterprises can't implement vital infrastructure overnight.
And our IT management weenies aren't going to look at a new software package with no history from a vendor with no history in this market and no history of offering enterprise-level support.
IF Google did start selling their software, it would be at least 5 years before any enterprise IT shops even looked at it.
Basically, we don't have the money or space (or energy) to manage an Exchange server in-house, and our email is already hosted off-site, through our website provider. So moving to Google realistically offers no drawbacks I've been able to think of (as I'm sure our web host would hand over our sensitive documents as readily, if not more so, than Google) and will finally let us do calendaring and simple document sharing (neither of which we're able to do particularly well right now). In addition, everyone is already using Thunderbird, from the previous GM's tech decisions, and I anticipate using the calendaring plugin for Thunderbird, coupled with GCalDaemon or a Thunderbird syncing plugin, to be a huge improvement over our current system. And, since I've already played with GCalDaemon on my home computer to sync with my personal Google account, I don't anticipate many transition pains. Likewise, I know the small non-profit down the hall is also using Google Apps for Domains for their email.
Again, I think you're right - from everything I've heard, Exchange and Outlook are a fantastic solution on a medium or large network, if you have the resources for them. But for small businesses with little or no IT staff, it's overkill and Google Apps for Domains seems to be a pretty great solution.
-Trillian
He's exactly right. Add in SMS logging and unified contact management (Cellphone phonebook synchronization + email address book, etc) and you have a huge winner.
Using this approach the message could arrive via a window showing a virtual aggregated IRC/sms channel the user was talking in, or if the user was mobile and the message was urgent could arrive via SMS to his phone. Heck, both of them could be using SMS and neither of them would know or care whether the other was online or not.
Imagine being able to send a message to someone and not care what address they are at right now or how to contact them.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
I really don't get this. I mean don't people ever learn that trying to cram more and more functionality into one thing just ends up creating a bloated crappy mess that nobody wants to use?
Make Thunderbird a great mail reader. It's not bad now but there is obviously room for improvement. Forget about making it read news. Forget about making it handle RSS. And for god's sake forget about making it into a calendaring program. Sheesh.... just make it a great mail client. AND get together with the people who are interested in news readers, rss handlers and scheduling programs and create a standard so that individual programs for each of these functions can cooperate/inter-operate with each other.
Create a seamless (appearing at least) system where users can pick the RSS reader they want to use, the calendaring program they want to use and still have them work seamlessly with the mail program they want to use. Not a monolithic bloated unmaintainable monstrosity that is supposed to do everything and locks a user into only those ways of doing things. Haven't the experiences of the last forty years of software and systems design taught us anything?
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop