E-mail is no longer about channeling conversations between people, as Alistair Croll suggests. Instead, it has become a record of what we do online and, as such, our in-box must fundamentally change or face extinction.
It's a provocative argument. I suspect that it's also true.
Croll writes:
Today, I have to visit dozens of other sites and services to make sense of my online life. This is a waste: I already have a record of all these transactions in my in-box. I just need a better way to look at them.
Gmail offered a tantalizing glimpse of what in-boxes could be, but it stopped short of recognizing this shift from conversations to a digital record of our online lives. The in-box of the future looks more like log file analysis and aggregation, and less like an e-mail platform.
Amen. I've actually been wondering for years why an e-commerce company hasn't arisen from analysis of the in-box: to know where I'm going, what I want to buy (and what I have bought), and more, all a company would need is a glimpse into my in-box. For real value, I'd give that access in a heartbeat.
Appetizingly, Microsoft is unlikely to be able to transform e-mail with Outlook and the Exchange Server: it is already too deep into its Innovator's Dilemma investment in the old world of e-mail. Plus, its Outlook/Exchange architecture is too calcified to dramatically shift e-mail's focus.
Google could do it with Gmail, or Yahoo could with Zimbra and Yahoo Mail. Done right, I'd put my money on Yahoo or some other open-source e-mail offering because this sort of thing is tailor-made for the community efforts of open source. Let one company or community create the core, and then invite an add-on community to build around it.
Maybe Mozilla should be doing this with Thunderbird? Certainly, someone should.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Updated at bottom with some clarifications.
It's impressive to be able to give away 31.2 million free Gmail accounts, as Google has. It's even more impressive to get customers to pay for 40 million mailboxes, as Zimbra reported today, representing a sharp spike from the 20 million paid mailboxes reported in early 2009.
The secret to Zimbra's success? Innovation and integration, in part. While Google Maps has found its way into a range of different applications, Zimbra leads Gmail in mash-ups (called "Zimlets" in Zimbra parlance). My company is a Zimbra customer, and one of our sales engineers wrote a Zimlet to integrate Alfresco with Zimbra...in his spare time...over a weekend.
Yes, Zimbra is that easy to extend.
As for innovation, as just one example Zimbra beat Gmail to offline application access by two years. Not bad for a company with a fraction of Google's employees (or PhDs).
As VentureBeat points out, Zimbra is now ahead of Gmail in unique mailboxes and only slightly behind Microsoft's Hotmail service. That's pretty impressive: one little open-source company takes on the two titans of software and wins (against Gmail), or shortly could win (against Hotmail).
Yes, the jump from 20 million to 40 million is likely due to Comcast's decision to use Zimbra for its user e-mail accounts. But it's still impressive.
Frankly, it's a shame that Zimbra ended up with Yahoo, which has 92.5 million mailboxes. Though Zimbra is a standout in the industry, Yahoo's own strength in consumer e-mail likely keeps Zimbra in second place for resources internally, especially since Zimbra's enterprise-grade e-mail may not be a tight strategic fit. Zimbra would have been an exceptional match for Apple or Adobe with their design-savvy customer bases.
What's done is done, however, and Zimbra will just have to settle for getting 40 million paid mailboxes while others can hardly give that many away for free. It's a tough job, but someone has got to do it.
UPDATE: I should have pointed out that the Gmail numbers relate to U.S. totals. It wasn't my intent to mislead on that; I simply failed to call it out, and apologize. Also, as pointed out in the VentureBeat story, to which I linked, none of the numbers - Google's or Zimbra's - are absolutely to be relied upon, as ComScore numbers can be inaccurate and Zimbra's are self-reported. Even so, Zimbra's progress is impressive.
A commentator below rightly points out the difference between active users of a service and the raw number of mailboxes sold (in Zimbra's case). This is a useful, but not dispositive, point. If anything, it probably affects Gmail's reported numbers more negatively than Zimbra's.
At any rate, which problem would you rather have: paid but inactive users or freebie inactive users? I'm guessing that Zimbra will happily take the former, and work to innovate more to turn passive accounts into active users; otherwise, Comcast and other customers simply won't renew their subscriptions.
As for the source of the 20-million user jump for Zimbra, some of this comes from bring the Comcast users online with Zimbra. Zimbra announced the deal in 2007 but that there's a big time gap between closing a deal and deployment.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Is Zimbra enterprise-ready? Yes, it is.
At least, that's the news from Stanford, which today announced that it is replacing its campus-wide email system with Zimbra. TechCrunch outs the competition on the deal, too: Google's Gmail and Microsoft Exchange.
This is the latest in a series of victories for Zimbra, which includes Georgia Tech, University of Wisconsin, Texas A&M, Cal Poly, and University of Pennsylvania. Zimbra powers the email systems for over 300 universities worldwide. That comes in around an impressive 1.5 million email addresses ending in ".edu."
I use Zimbra on a daily basis and absolutely love it. I love it for some of the same reasons that Stanford chose Zimbra:
Zimbra was selected because the technology allows access to e-mail, calendar and contact lists from a single, unified web interface--enabling easy sharing of information among the various services, according to Ammy Hill, campus readiness specialist for IT Services. She added that Zimbra is an open-source, standards-based solution that works equally well on Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems.
It's that last bit that I particularly love. With Zimbra, no operating system is a second-class citizen. With more and more people switching to the Mac, this is particularly important. Who wants a Microsoft-centered existence that neglects those that haven't capitulated to Windows?
Bill Gates may misunderstand open source, but he's fairly accurate in his portrayal of Google's attempts to get into the enterprise. Whatever one wants to say about the quality of Microsoft's software, one can't dispute its reach. Google, on the other hand, has been king in consumer search...and that's about it.
It's a big "it" but it tends to mask Google's continual failures in just about everything else (Used many of these lately?), including enterprise applications, as Gates points out:
In terms of Google, not to overstate it, but they really don't understand the special needs of business. Today, their economic model is based on consumer search. They have done an incredible job there and obviously we're investing in challenging them in that space ...
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