MailCo: Am I missing something?

I read the news today (oh boy … Beatles anyone?) and was excited to see that Mozilla has spun out MailCo:

Mozilla will provide an initial $3 million in seed funding to launch MailCo. This is expected to be spent mostly on building a small team of people who are passionate about e-mail and Internet communications. As MailCo develops it and the Mozilla Foundation will evaluate what’s the best model for long-term sustainability. Mozilla may well invest additional funds; we also hope that there are other paths for sustainability.

This is the result of months of discussion among Mozilla and its community on what the fate of Thunderbird should be. Thinking more about this, I’m left wondering how the launch of MailCo is such a good thing for Thunderbird, email messaging and Mozilla.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been under the distinct impression that Mozilla’s “main thing” is helping make the “open web” a reality. Mitchell has been blogging about it. Heck, I even have the Lance Armstrong “LiveStrong” bracelet that I got from Mozilla at OSCON that says “support the open web” on it. Great. I’m all for it. I’m drinking the Koolaid. But how does spinning out a company to do email and communication help the ‘open web’, Mozilla and its community?

While reading about this a friend forwarded me a gushy piece by Alfresco’s Matt Asay. Quoting from the article:

Mozilla has an excellent track record of taking Microsoft head-on, and winning

Which he mentions in the context of hoping MailCo will tackle Microsoft and their dominance in the email space. Now, last time I checked they were 0-1-1 against Microsoft. If you’ll recall Netscape competed against Microsoft in Browser Wars v1.0 and Microsoft absolutely crushed them into non-existence. As far as the success of Firefox, yeah, its been a great product but they weren’t competing against Microsoft, they were in a one-horse race. Microsoft had won so there was no need for innovation in that space. Now I love Firefox as much as the next guy (I’m authoring this post in Firefox) but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. By many accounts they have 20, 25%, maybe even 30% of the browser market share; this is by no means “a huge swath of the market” as Matt puts. Finally, Matt mentions:

To be truly disruptive I believe that Mozilla (or, rather, MailCo) will need to focus on both the e-mail server and client.

Gah?! Really? The last project I heard that was going to do that was called Chandler. I don’t even want to comment further but I will say this; simple works, simple wins. Client/server is about as simple as an Anna Nicole Smith paternity case.

Alright, alright … I’m being a little hard on Matt but I’m trying to make a point. The world wants to love Mozilla and for lots of reasons. Its a great group of people with a noble cause. However, I’m afraid they lack the ability to make hard decisions because of fear of ticking off their “community”. Sometimes you need to make hard decisions and sometimes that angers people. IMHO its better to make a hard decision for the sake of the community (and focus and mission and vision) than to skirt the issue by spinning out a company.

My advice to Mozilla? Do one thing and do it well. Ditch Thunderbird as a product and MailCo as a company. Its not your “main thing” and will only serve to bifurcate Mozilla’s focus. Thunderbird will survive if its meant to. Its an open source project. Focus on your main thing. You do that by encouraging instigators and thinking beyond the browser. Protocols, standards, web services and platforms. Not another answer to email and messaging.

Speaking of “subversive” … let’s not forget that Firefox was built by a couple of renegade (smart) punks that just did it. They said “we’re going this way, fuck process”. It was a small team that made decisions outside of the “best practices” in place at the time. There were other rogue elements that were doing things for the sake of the community outside of the control of the then fledgling MoFo. They all pissed off a lot of the folks at Mozilla/Netscape by going against the grain … and guess what? It worked. For MailCo to succeed they will need to do this too and that may mean biting the hand that feeds … will that be possible? I just don’t know.

My sole hope for success here lies in the fact that David Ascher (the head of MailCo) is a smart, no-nonsense and extremely capable guy. If he can really build an organization that is unique, truly separate from the mother ship and with the ability to quickly get to market, iterate even faster and build a passionate community then they have a fighting chance. The last thing we need is another “Chandler”. If your first goal is to reach out to the Thunderbird community to seek advice on the next best steps you’ve already failed. Whatever it is that changes messaging will be light, easy-to-use, easy to integrate with current workflows and leverage open standards and oodles of existing work. If it starts off with platform or consensus building its doomed.

I really do mean this when I say it; best of luck David and company.