Mozilla forming new company for Thunderbird

Mozilla has made its decision and will be spinning off Thunderbird into a new organization. Back in August, we covered a discussion about the future of the Thunderbird project, which was spawned by a series of postings in the blog of Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla Corp. At that time, it was recognized that Thunderbird was suffering from a lack of attention, mostly because of an intense focus on Firefox. This week, Baker announced that the results of that discussion were to start a new for-profit company to nurture Thunderbird.

The new company, as yet unnamed and referred to as "MailCo", will start with three million dollars in seed money from Mozilla. The intent is to use that money to hire a small team to foster email and internet communications through Thunderbird. To that end, they have hired David Ascher, currently CTO at ActiveState, as the CEO of the new company.

Ascher also posted a blog entry about the new organization, providing some insights into the role of MailCo:

The biggest job for Ascher and MailCo will be to determine what, exactly, Thunderbird should be. From the comments on Baker's blog and elsewhere, it is clear that there is no consensus on what an email client should and should not do. There are many constituencies; trying to please them all is likely to please none.

There are lots of questions about integration of email with other internet services: instant messages, RSS feeds, VoIP, etc. There are also questions of local vs. remote message storage and web vs. host-based clients. Each has its advantages and disadvantages along with a vocal set of users. If MailCo starts moving in a particular direction, to the detriment of supporting others, they may lose some significant portion of their [PULL QUOTE: While profit may not be a requirement, some kind of potentially sustainable business model will probably have to be established. END QUOTE] user base. But a decision will have to be made in order to concentrate their efforts; it will be hard to find the right balance.

While profit may not be a requirement, some kind of potentially sustainable business model will probably have to be established. It is hard to imagine that Mozilla will keep pumping money into the company, though Baker makes it clear that they will consider further investment. Thunderbird does not have the obvious 'sell eyes to Google' model that Firefox has so successfully used; it directly competes with Google and other, similar, ad-supported mail sites.

For various reasons, Thunderbird has never had a large development community in the way that Firefox or other free software projects do. There is a core group of developers, presumably strong candidates to be hired on at MailCo, but in order for the project to succeed, it will need a bigger army of volunteers. There can be friction between paid developers and volunteers, especially if the volunteers feel like they aren't being heard. Growing and working with the development community will be an important part of MailCo's first year or two.

Many folks point to the stagnation of the main competition, Outlook, and liken it to the situation, several years back, with Firefox and Internet Explorer. There are some similarities, but there is also one big difference: Exchange. It is relatively easy for a user to change their desktop applications, even in a controlled workplace environment, but companies are unlikely to toss out their Exchange servers anytime soon. Because Microsoft completely controls the mail client to Exchange server protocol, Thunderbird will have a hard time being a drop-in replacement, in the way that Firefox is. One possibility would be to work with Openchange or similar Exchange replacement projects to provide an end-to-end solution for the enterprise.

Obviously there are some challenges ahead, for email clients in general and for Thunderbird in particular, but there is reason for optimism as well. Many did not expect Firefox to achieve the level of adoption that it has – it has made remarkable inroads against an entrenched competitor – and many of the same folks are behind the effort to give Thunderbird a push. Though it may seem like Mozilla is kicking Thunderbird out of the nest, they are actually giving it some resources so that it has a chance to fly. It certainly will not suffer under an organization devoted solely to its development.