Messaging naturally drifts into the broader area of personal information management, of which calendaring and task management is a key component (along with contacts and various kinds of notes). From my perspective, my life has been disorganized ever since I quite using ECCO (which my wife still relies on, running on Windows 7, even though the last release of the product was over a decade ago). For me, lack of messaging integration makes it unusable.

Unfortunately the commercial failure of ECCO and similar products have given an aura of “avoid this” to the whole area of personal information management. Meanwhile, as you observe, there are really no good products available, and our lives remain disorganized. I think that the dream of, one day, coming up with a viable personal information manager is part of what keeps me motivated to stay involced in messaging, as that would need to be a critical component of any successful product.

You’re right, the enterprise is one area where people still really need a mail client, but that is due to their business, and more importantly their organizational needs.

As a busy, and technically inclined mom, I needed to find a good calendar application to keep myself straight and also to keep the husband in the loop. Sunbird was the *only* choice (and IMO is still the only good choice, at least on windows).

I have two kids and myself to keep track of, and now that we’re no longer together I also have the added complexity of custody. There’s ballet, sports, appointments, school, holidays. What weekends are mine? When do we need to switch weekends because of travel?

Then (bear with me) there’s my period. For some reason keeping track of this is really important to women. Even more so to families that are trying to get pregnant, but still important to families who are not! I held on to ICQ 95 for years because the timer function was perfect for reminding me to take my pill, as well as allowing me to snooze it if I didn’t take it right away. I use my phone for this now, but it’ll only snooze for an hour, so if I miss it, I miss it.

So yeah right now I have a lot more use for a calendar than an integrated product, but what happens if my kids’ schools start learning how to use email/calendar invites instead of paper newsletters? How awesome would that be.

But you’re right, the people who use the products right now are sitting in cubicles, and people tend to want to use the same products at home as they do at work. So I dunno, maybe the way to break into the home market is still through the enterprise. Or maybe it’s time for a whole new grassroots movement to reach a whole new user base with a product that could change their lives.

if you and nine like-minded friends were each willing to give me 10% of your salaries, perhaps I could be persuaded

I donate 10$ each month to Thunderbird (and another 10$ to Calendar). If 399 other people did the same (i.e. 4,000 $/month), perhaps someone (you?) could make Thunderbird better (a’la “AboutFace”).

So, are there 399 people reading this blog…

http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/donate.html (why no Thunderbird here?)

As for you Snowl comment, that’s a good example of fragmentation within Mozilla itself. Do we really benefit from Thunderbird, Snowl, SeaMonkey, Postdrop, and SpiceBird all pursuing their independent visions? I don’t believe that is in the user’s best interest, which is what MoFo is supposed to be all about.

Their is a well-known small businessman joke, that “I’m going to lose money on every sale, but make it up with volume!”. The “everything has changed” euphoria of the internet boom tried to pooh-pooh those ideas, but 1 + 1 still equals 2, and understanding the revenue stream is still critical to success. “I’m going to accept donations and subsidies from foundations” is a valid revenue stream, but you have to be doing something those that those foundations want. Making the world safe for cheapskates is not such a value.

I hope you understand though that MoMo has been clear that SlowPlod has no reasonable change of success, if you define success as “getting large enough to impact the direction of messaging.” They don’t really have the resources for that, and today even a client that was much better than Outlook would have a hard time dislodging Microsoft from the market – because then you have to start concerning yourself with integration with Sharepoint, and Office, and Active Directory, and pretty soon you are doing AboutFace as well. We have a name for such a company that can do this, it’s called “Microsoft”.

Still Thunderbird exists, and has a following. What do you do with that? Maybe what you need is a separate company that could focus on Thunderbird the product, without being distracted by Firefox. Oops, perhaps you thought MoMo was that. Well it isn’t (though perhaps it could have been). They are a subsidiary of the Mozilla *Foundation*, and are bound to fulfill Foundation values. Thinking with Foundation values, there are evils that need squashing in messaging – siloing of user’s messaging data and relationships into separate entities like Twitter and Facebook that don’t represent the “open web” they are bound to promote, for example. MoMo wants to fix those issues, and they are not convinced that fixing bugs in Thunderbird gets them there.

The preferred solution is for volunteer open source developers to come forward to do this. But that is a hard sell. I could be one such person, but I am not convinced that I want to devote all of my precious time to that. Now, if you and nine like-minded friends were each willing to give me 10% of your salaries, perhaps I could be persuaded …

(
And actually, your blog software behaviour is a good way to demonstrate how discussions in the web often suck:
- “reply” jumps down to the textarea, but you lose context
- quoting is tedious
- you can’t efficiently follow threads, because you can’t tell what you already read
- and the mails I get about new comments just link to the top of the page

I hate web forums.
)