With all respect for the people working at Mozilla/Thunderbird and fully understand the limitation they are faced with, I would like to see a more detailed mission statement for the products (TB/LG) and the future of it. Only expressing TB is for individual users, SOHO and not for the Enterprise is a very vague  statement

I was going to respond to that in the thread, but I got wordy so I posted this blog entry instead.

At the recently completed Mozilla Summit, variations of this request were made by many people that are [...]]]> In a recent tb-planning post, neandr wrote:

With all respect for the people working at Mozilla/Thunderbird and fully understand the limitation they are faced with, I would like to see a more detailed mission statement for the products (TB/LG) and the future of it. Only expressing TB is for individual users, SOHO and not for the Enterprise is a very vague  statement

I was going to respond to that in the thread, but I got wordy so I posted this blog entry instead.

At the recently completed Mozilla Summit, variations of this request were made by many people that are close to the Thunderbird project (including myself). But after listening to several days of Firefox people extolling the virtues of moving everything to the browser, and being “more like the web”, I have a new appreciation of how difficult the development of a vision statement is for the Thunderbird team.

The standard game plan that Mozilla projects are expected to follow is to develop an application with a significantly high market share so that they can use their market influence to fight for the rights of individual users. Mozilla is a fascinating organization as a hybrid commercial/public interest organization, and they take their values quite seriously.

Unfortunately Thunderbird, which is the only real product that MoMo currently has, hovers around 6 million users, which is much lower than the number they believe are necessary to have the influence they would like (I have heard 100 million users as a goal). Nobody currently has a concrete plan to develop a product with 100 million users. So the current strategy (as I see it) is to try a series of experiments to try to develop some concepts that might be used to specify the 100 million user product. I can’t resist naming things (my wife calls me “an Adam”), so let’s call this future product by the code name “Gigabird”.

One such experiment is Raindrop. Other experiments are going on in extensions to Thunderbird, which seem to be focusing on changes to the user interface. Right now, that is where the vast majority of the developer resources are focused at MoMo.

So if your real strategic mission is to develop Gigabird, what do you do with your legacy product Thunderbird? The big problem is that the “ordinary users” that are the primary focus of Firefox (and by implication also MoMo) are migrating away from email for many forms of messaging to other media – Twitter, Facebook, text messages, web forums, blog comments, etc. The hardcore users of email (who are likely to continue to use a desktop client) are sitting in office cubicles, yet going after these “enterprise” users is counter-cultural for Mozilla.

So what are the strategic choices available to MoMo?

the HailMary

The goal here is to try to come up with one or more really clever innovations that will form the basis of Gigabird. This is, after all, the way that some of the new messaging formats have occurred, with Twitter as the poster child. Using these innovations as a base, the basic plan for Gigabird will be formulated at some point in the future. This is the current MoMo strategy, at least as I see it. Given the existing Mozilla culture, I would probably do this as well. (Warning: should this strategy every become publicly revealed, the director will disavow any knowledge of these actions.)

the AboutFace

Here you notice that the values-driven direction that you felt so passionate about is actually not going to get you anywhere, so you make a major readjustment in values to allow you to pragmatically accept a new direction. Such moves have been done by Mozilla in the past, and are part of the standard corporate Myth propagated by Mitchell Baker (the story about how in the early days they were adamant about never shipping a binary). The application to MoMo could be to accept that what they have is an email product, and their future users are going to be sitting in cubicles. Users in cubicles should have rights too, so there could be a valid Mozilla Foundation purpose in fighting for the rights of these “enterprise users” and let Thunderbird develop into an enterprise product.

the SlowPlod

This is the direction that existing Thunderbird users are hoping for. The ultimate goal is to slowly improve Thunderbird until it is undeniably the best email client around. You fix any important bugs.  You support all of the hot new messaging concepts. You spiff up the user interface, incrementally adding new features that provide small improvements to usability. You keep your power uses happy with lots of extensions for specialized purposes. It’s pretty clear that dmose does not believe that he has sufficient resources to pursue this strategy, nor is he likely to have them in the foreseeable future. The Thunderbird code base is also really hard to adapt to these new media (witness the struggles that I have had or jcranmer’s blog ). I think that the MoMo team wishes us well, but believes that the future lies elsewhere.

the VacuumTube

Just because you can’t change the direction of humanity does not mean that you have nothing. Vacuum tubes are long gone – yet the guitar player at my church proudly uses his fancy amp with glowing tubes showing through plexiglass. The company that bought one of my previous businesses had also previously purchased a manufacturer of vacuum tubes, which had morphed into specialized purposes like lamps for spectroscopy, and nuclear-warfare-resistant cathode ray tubes. Email clients will be with us forever, and in the hands of people who love them could have a useful future in various niches.

My Prediction

MoMo will pursue the HailMary until they have enough ideas to formulate a real plan. At that point, they will want to devote all of their resources to Gigabird, and be looking for an honorable way to retreat from Thunderbird – which will be a variation of the VacuumTube. The likely retreat will probably be some sort of future custodianship by a conglomeration of companies that provide a freemium strategy. So if there was a basic, free Thunderbird product that could be enhanced with addons with commercial value (like my Exchange Web Services product, or Postbox as a Thunderbird addon), then MoMo could pursue their vision without abandoning their Thunderbird users, and let companies like MesQuilla and Postbox support Thunderbird.

In an extensive article in Atlantic magazine (I always read the Atlantic while travelling), James Fallow describes efforts that Google is undertaking to try to revive the viability of news reporting as a professional activity. A lot of this revolves around different methods of bundling content with monetization schemes. In the traditional newspaper model, news [...]]]> During my current trek to the Bay Area, I seem to be bombarded with news about Google. I was particularly interested in the different way that Google views its business model, and that got me thinking about how Thunderbird fits into Mozilla’s business model.

In an extensive article in Atlantic magazine (I always read the Atlantic while travelling), James Fallow describes efforts that Google is undertaking to try to revive the viability of news reporting as a professional activity. A lot of this revolves around different methods of bundling content with monetization schemes. In the traditional newspaper model, news is one of many parts of the bundle, with monetization provided by various advertising streams. The internet has provided many ways to unbundle the various pieces of the newspaper, with the result that the hard news content no longer has a sufficient bundling with the monetization schemes.

Google may be viewed as a new kind of bundle, with its many services (search, maps, email, news, etc.) all part of the bundle of services that are attached to the monetization scheme of search advertising. The Atlantic article notes that:

Virtually all of Google’s (enormous) revenue comes from a tiny handful of its activities: mainly the searches people conduct when they’re looking for something to buy. That money subsidizes all the other services the company offers …

That requires a new way of thinking about understanding the relationship of traditional “cost centers” to “revenue”. When Google’s Andy Rubin was asked to justify the expense of Android development in this interview in the San Jose Mercury News, he responded:

So all we have to focus on are those types of innovations that scale for large audiences, and … the revenue crank just turns.

So what is Mozilla’s bundle and monetization scheme, and how does Thunderbird contribute to that bundle?

Mozilla’s main bundle that is attached to a monetization scheme is the FireFox browser, which is monetized through people’s use of a particular search provider when connected through the bundle. Thunderbird (and its related Mozilla Messaging cost center) do not currently contribute anything directly to that bundle and its monetization scheme.

I don’t believe that Mozilla’s subsidization of Thunderbird can continue indefinitely. Perhaps that was possible for awhile, but Mozilla’s bundle can be expected to come under continual competitive attack, which will eventually force them to marshall the resources needed to defend the bundle. Mozilla Messaging and Thunderbird need to be part of the solution, and not just a cost drag, when the tough decisions are being made to defend the bundle.

If we think like Google, it’s pretty obvious what the step is that is needed for Thunderbird to become a major contributor to Mozilla’s main business of “Firefox the bundle”.  We need to figure out ways to attract people to the bundle, and get them to linger as long as possible on the bundle while the “revenue crank just turns.” The obvious solution is that the underlying communications code that drives Thunderbird needs to be repackaged as a FireFox extension. (Since I call that codebase Skink, let’s temporarily use the code name SkinkFox to describe the Thunderbird-as-Firefox-extension product.)  SkinkFox could have the same relationship to Thunderbird that Lightning has to Sunbird: the same product packaged both standalone, and as an extension.

“That’s just SeaMonkey!” you say. Well no it is not. If you think like an engineer and focus on features, then I guess SkinkFox is similar to SeaMonkey. But thinking like a marketer, the goal of this is to build the FireFox brandname and revenue stream, and SeaMonkey does not contribute to that while SkinkFox does.

Technically, great efforts are already being made to reduce the barriers that keep the mailnews (Skink) codebase separate from FireFox. I don’t think it would be a huge leap to figure out how to merge Thunderbird’s user interface and tab system into FireFox’s.

As Thunderbird enters a critical rethinking in the next few months in the aftermath of Thunderbird 3.0/3.1, SkinkFox is one of a variety of thoughts I will be giving on possible futures for messaging at Mozilla.