Mozilla Thunderbird Takes Wing
Mozilla is spinning off Thunderbird, creating an as-yet-unnamed subsidiary to manage and over see the future development of the desktop e-mail client. Mozilla did the same thing in 2005 with the Firefox browser and the company has previously hinted that it might spin off Thunderbird, but now it’s official: Thunderbird has flown the coop.
Thunderbird users have nothing to fear though, the reorganization won’t change much from the end user point of view, at least for the moment. Eventually, if Thunderbird can mimic the success of Firefox, the new subsidiary could help speed the development of new features and improvements.
Dr. David Ascher, currently CTO and VP Engineering of ActiveState, will head the new company and Mozilla will kick it off with $3 million in seed funding.
One of Ascher’s top goals is to improve the plug-in architecture of Thunderbird, which currently lacks many of the features that Firefox offers developers.
But even with improvements, Thunderbird has a far more difficult road ahead of it than Firefox did. Many have already ditched their desktop e-mail clients in favor of web-based solutions and many of those that haven’t are tied to Microsoft Outlook which provides integration with Microsoft Exchange Server, something Thunderbird does not. There have been some plug-ins that attempt to make Thunderbird work with Exchange, but the experience is nowhere near as smooth as that of Outlook.
Thunderbird also faces the fact that all three primary OSes already ship with built-in e-mail clients, many of which have tight integration with the rest of the OS’s applications, something that will be difficult for the Thunderbird team to replicate.
Still, the Thunderbird project has some lofty goals, many of which involve moving beyond the simple e-mail client. Mitchell Baker, Chief Executive Officer of the Mozilla Corporation, lists the following goals in her post about the Thunderbird announcement:
- Move Thunderbird forward to provide better, deeper email solutions
- Create a better user experience for a range of Internet communications — how does / should email work with IM, RSS, VoIP, SMS, site-specific email, etc?
- Spark the types of community involvement and innovation that we’ve seen around web “browsing” and Firefox.
Mozilla, as always, is aiming for the stars, how much of that translates into real world improvements remains to be seen. But for the some 5 million of us currently using Thunderbird, today’s move is largely good news — there’s now a dedicated team focused on improving the Thunderbird e-mail client.
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