From webmail to Facebook: the future of Thunderbird

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 15 Oct 2007 at 12:07

Compared to the runaway success of Firefox, Mozilla's email client, Thunderbird, has always been the bridesmaid and never the bride. Increasingly in Firefox's shadow and laregly ignored by Mozilla, something drastic needed to be done - and in September it was.

Mozilla spun off a new company dedicated to the email client, allocated it $3 million, and told it to go make something of itself. We caught up with Dr David Ascher, the man appointed to lead the new company, to find out what the future holds for Thunderbird.

Congratulations on the new role, what made you take it on?

The challenge. I think everybody knows that for a long time Thunderbird wasn't getting a lot of attention, but it has huge untapped potential and we're starting with five million users. We also have the backing of Mozilla, so there's a lot we can do here.

In your blog you talk about evolving Thunderbird, but is there actually anywhere left for the desktop email client to go?

Desktop email clients have stagnated over the last decade, while things like spam became a real problem, so people turned to webmail. There are tasks, though, that are still better suited to the desktop: handling lots of data, quick searches. At the moment people have to check their webmail, work mail, MySpace and Facebook [accounts] individually, so all those tasks are broken up. It'd be nice to be able to bring them all together. I think there's actually a variety of places we can go with Thunderbird.

What do you think your biggest challenge is going to be?

The biggest short-term hurdle will be to energise the community again and explain why people need Thunderbird. People are afraid of losing email, and they should be, so they stick with what they know. But people curse their email clients daily because they can't find things, or it doesn't work quick enough. I want to show people that we can still do something interesting here.

In the long term, I think people have very individual needs. So building a platform that can be a foundation for high-school users and business users and giving them both what they need is going to be a big technical and engineering challenge.

How has the exit of two lead developers, Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu, affected your plans? That's a lot of experience to lose.

It wasn't a surprise to me, to be honest. They told the management before I came into the role that they were thinking about moving on. The impression I had was they wanted to start their own company. I think open source has a long history of surviving the departure of contributors and continuing to develop.

Thunderbird's new parent company is a for-profit organisation and Tristan Nitot [president of Mozilla Europe] has said it has to find a revenue stream. Have you worked out where that's coming from yet?

It's tied to the long-term strategy of the company, but I think it's important to mention that we don't have a mandate to maximise profits, just to build as much independence as possible. We want to create a public benefit company and that's the priority. The best, most efficient way to do that is through the creation of a taxable entity. We're not going to place profits over public benefit.