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
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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