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I made two smart decisions in the past two years. First, I switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox–what a blissful move that was! Second, I recently moved all of my email online, switching from the incredibly slow Outlook 2007 to Gmail. So, you can imagine my excitement at the news Mozilla will turn Thunderbird into an online email platform.
Mozilla will spin off a new company, seeded with $3M and headed up by Dr. David Ascher, currently CTO and VP Engineering of ActiveState. The new internet mail platform will be based on, and retain the name, Thunderbird.
Over at CNET, Matt Asay offers up his enthusiastic thoughts on the announcement and highlights how Thunderbird can take on Microsoft by offering internet email that could also take on Microsoft’s Exchange. Asay also has an interesting collaboration suggestion…
It would be truly incredible if Mozilla could collaborate with Yahoo! on this, fresh off its acquisition of Zimbra. A server that married Zimbra’s flexibility and “soft client” (browser-based email client), with Thunderbird’s “fat client” (for those of us who don’t like web-based email) would be a clear winner. I don’t think it will happen, but it would be impressive….
