Check out David Ascher’s blog, where he’s launched Mozilla Messaging, the new Mozilla company (a subsidiary of the Foundation, and a sibling company of MoCo) that’s focusing on how we communicate with one another. I’ll be very candid and say that I think this is both a very tough job and an amazing opportunity — and that there are lots of reasons it may not work in terms of revitalizing mail (both Thunderbird and mail overall, which David’s done a good job framing in his post). But I’m also very optimistic about the new venture and that we’ve put together a group of people — David and Dan, among others, who are very smart, very dedicated, and are committed to rethinking communications from the ground up.
They’ve got a near term roadmap starting to develop that should make Thunderbird even more useful for a large variety of people (search improvements) and significantly more suitable for enterprise deployments (inclusion of calendar).
I’m really excited that the effort is starting to make progress, to hire, to build a team, and to articulate a positive vision for what mail can be. This is a story that will get written over a period of years, built on the very good foundation of Thunderbird, but with much left to go. I’m hopeful and optimistic that it will result in a great series of software releases, but also in a vital, energetic, creative community thinking about how to improve the way that human beings communicate, and making those visions real.
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