Hello Vili, Sunday, March 1, 2009, 9:10:32 AM, you wrote: > I would side with Stefan on this, rewrite from scratch, if possible, > and if Ritlabs has the resources. [...]
The problem is that Stefan/ Ritlabs nowhere did say that they are going to rewrite it from scratch. The quote that Marek and others found only says that the message base format was rewritten; as for IMAP, it's going to be "improved" or "reworked", which does not necessarily mean a rewrite (and even if it does, then how do we know that it's going to be significantly better). This all boils down to the fact that Ritlabs never did explicitly say what *exactly* is going to be improved when IMAP gets their attention. Everyone just assumes they are going to fix some more obvious bugs. IMAP is broader than that, other clients can take advantage of that. >> reasons) was really a reflection of the fact that Mulberry had failed >> to grow a market share that could sustain the company in a market >> where free clients (of varying quality) are readily available." from > See the cinical note: "free clients (of varying quality)"? > Unfortunately, today it is not about quality anymore, but more like > quantity. I believe, Ritlabs can balance quantity (they have to sell > for the public) with quality. In an ideal world, this would be an easy > choice to make, but this is not an ideal world now. I beg to differ. Starting a business in developing e-mail client software has been a rather risky thing to do since a few years. This is due to the fact that the usage profile of e-mail usage in general has changed -- while e-mail used to be a value in itself, now it's used in conjunction with a host of other services. The most obvious example is Exchange/ Outlook with its collaboration/ calendaring/ other corporate blahblah solution. I don't even comment on the fact that e-mail is used less and less by younger people (it's losing to IM, twitter, etc) and it might be that it stabilizes for a few years for all semi-official correspondence (as opposed to all correspondence a few years ago). After that, who knows what happens to it? You can see it happen in Mozilla Foundation today. Many people complain that Thunderbird is being mistreated, is underfunded etc, while Firefox is given all the attention. This is simply the result of their revenue stream coming via the web browser business, Google deals, etc. I guess that no one is going to be surprised if Thunderbird gets abandoned one day (although on the other hand many people see Thunderbird + Sunbird as a viable Outlook alternative in the future; just the server side thing is missing). I am pretty sure Ritlabs are feeling the same way today. They know they are not going to win the whole world with The Bat!, they already only cater to a small group of enthusiasts that keep buying new versions. It gives them enough money to pay their bills and I guess they'll be doing it for a few more years -- as long as a group of people of certain size is going to pay for it. That's probably the reason that IMAP never gets "reworked". The number of people asking for it is probably far too small to make it worthwhile for them. As for Mulberry: I am not saying that it was bound to fail. The idea was just what I said -- risky. They failed, which is a real pity in my opinion but it was not unexpected. And, to answer your point: some people *are* going to spend some money on e-mail client software, simply because they feel it's worth it. Or, to put it the other way round: they will spend it if it's better than other (free or cheaper) alternatives. This includes me and The Bat! but I don't care anymore about cosmetic changes. The only thing I need is good IMAP support. Now, it's just Ritlabs' decision what to do with it: they may keep doing basically nothing and live off it for a few next releases, they may take the risk and invest some money into development of IMAP or other 'big' features which may or may not pay off. Time will tell. -- Best regards, Robert Tomanek mailto:[email protected] ________________________________________________________ Current beta is 4.1.11.6 | 'Using TBBETA' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
