Mozilla isn't just about browsing anymore.
While the foundation made its name with the increasingly popular open-source Firefox browser, it is quickly moving beyond its roots, particularly in the area of e-mail. With the launch of Raindrop, its Google Wave-like unified messaging and collaboration system, as well as corporate uptake of Thunderbird, Mozilla may soon extend its reach well beyond its browser base.
Corporate America hasn't done much with Mozilla's Thunderbird, a competitor to Microsoft Outlook. Europe, however, has given it a warm reception. For example, the French tax authority recently selected Thunderbird to power 130,000 of its personal computers, replacing IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook.
It's a massive deal for Mozilla, though in the grand scheme of things, it's still tiny. Even so, it's an indication that Mozilla's e-mail story is credible, and could lead to greater adoption of Thunderbird and, eventually, Raindrop.
Much of Firefox's early traction was in Europe. The same could hold true for Thunderbird and Raindrop.
The question for me, however, is how it gets funded. Google has essentially funded Mozilla's browser development for years. It's unclear who the "Google" is for Mozilla's messaging ambitions, or whether the foundation intends to sell subscriptions to use the software through its for-profit corporation.
Regardless, Mozilla's presence in the messaging market is welcome. While we already have an exceptional open-source competitor to Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino in Zimbra, given the importance of messaging and collaboration to enterprise computing, it's useful to have an open-source foundation involved, too. About the only organizations that won't like this increased competition are the proprietary incumbents.
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.
Google is pretty fast-moving, as company cultures go, rolling out new products on a regular basis. And yet its popular Gmail service is only just now getting around to providing offline e-mail access, a feature that open-source Zimbra has had for nearly two years.
Excuse me, therefore, if I stifle a yawn at Google's announcement. While Google may claim nearly 70 percent of the search market, its rival, Yahoo, which acquired Zimbra in September 2007, is outpacing it in e-mail innovation.
It has ever been thus. Google's heart appears to be in search, not in alternative services like e-mail: it's rarely first to market with cutting-edge features for Gmail.
Will it matter? Perhaps not. But as Google and Yahoo look beyond the consumer search market to enterprise IT, I believe that things like enterprise-class e-mail, which Yahoo has in Zimbra, will come to matter more and more. Google won't forever have the luxury of playing catch-up with Yahoo's Zimbra on a two-year time delay.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Satish Dharmaraj, co-founder and CEO of open-source Zimbra, which sold for $350 million to Yahoo, is leaving Yahoo, as VentureBeat reports.
Though Zimbra president and CTO, Scott Dietzen, has been running day-to-day operations in Dharmaraj's place for some time, it's not a great time for Dharmaraj to leave Yahoo, as Boomtown suggests. Zimbra was always the sum of many important parts, but Dharmaraj helped to steer the company with very few visible flaws in execution. Yahoo needs that sort of leadership to rebuild its brand and expand its enterprise offerings from its Zimbra beachhead.
So, too bad for Yahoo, but I'm sure Dharmaraj will find his way to another successful startup. He's an exceptional entrepreneur. Perhaps it was hoping too much to expect him to stay at Yahoo or anywhere else for long.
Last I checked in June, Zimbra, Yahoo's open-source e-mail and calendar software, was at 11 million paid mailboxes. This was a healthy jump from 8 million paid mailboxes in May 2007 and the 4 million paid mailboxes TechCrunch reported back in October 2006.
Well, on Monday The VAR Guy reported there are 20 million paid mailboxes for Zimbra, a massive increase in roughly seven months. It's likely that a big chunk of these came from Zimbra's deal with Comcast. Still, that is amazing momentum.
I mentioned the other day that a significant customer uptake for Zimbra would be much more meaningful than IBM and Microsoft trading customers back and forth. Well, 20 million paid mailboxes spread over 30,000 customers is much more significant than IBM beating its chest over nabbing 5 million mailboxes from Microsoft.
Could Zimbra be the foundation for an enterprise challenge from Yahoo? I wouldn't rule it out.
However, to get there Zimbra/Yahoo has an uphill challenge, as a big percentage of Zimbra's customers fall into the education and small- and medium-size business markets. It's a hard sell to get enterprises to swap out their e-mail systems, and the standard open-source entry point (department-level deployments) doesn't work for e-mail (unless, of course, the customer wants to scale out with Cisco's Linux-based PostPath drop-in Exchange replacement).
Perhaps Yahoo/Zimbra should focus on building PostPath-esque drop-in Exchange integration?
IBM is crowing about its increase in Lotus Notes licenses to 145 million, up five million in the past year. That's nice, but I'm willing to bet that Microsoft could issue a similar press release, and probably could claim even more Notes/Domino emigrants to Exchange.
In fact, for the past few years Microsoft has been doing exactly that.
If one looks to neutral analysts to be the line judge in this discussion, the water becomes even murkier, as eWeek points out:
Market share estimates vary widely for Exchange and Lotus Notes. Gartner Dataquest's most recent report from 2008 shows Notes narrowing the gap on market leader Exchange, with IBM's Notes owning 40 percent share worldwide and Microsoft grabbing 48 percent for Exchange.
IDC's annual market share analysis of collaborative environments puts Microsoft's market share at 52 percent, with IBM's market share slipping 5 percent to 37.7 percent. A Ferris Research survey of 917 organizations worldwide found Exchange in 65 percent of those shops.
In the land of the big incumbent software vendors, it's really a matter of customer ping-pong, as SAP and Oracle's back-and-forth suggests, without significant market share gains at each other's expense.
When open-source Zimbra/Yahoo! claims to have gained five million licenses at either IBM's or Microsoft's expense, that will be real news, because it will represent real market share gains for a competitor. But this sort of PR from IBM? It's really just saying, "We nabbed five million seats from Microsoft while it was stealing five million from us."
Open-source email company Open-Xchange has raised a $9 million Series B round in a difficult financing environment, bringing its total funding to $17.8 million.
With this fresh infusion of cash Open-Xchange is expected to mount a more serious challenge to Microsoft's ubiquitous Exchange product. Open-Xchange claims 8.4 million paid mailboxes worldwide.
The real question for the company will be how to expand into enterprises. Most open-source software companies tend to infiltrate enterprises at the departmental level, proliferating from an initially small beachhead. Email, however, doesn't really work this way. Unlike an ECM or CRM system, it's tough to go off the company's Exchange or Domino grid to dally with Open-Xchange. It's a bit of an all-or-nothing approach.
This may work with SMB customers and in certain market segments (Education?), but it's a tough slog in large enterprises which may very well despise Exchange or Domino...but struggle to abandon either. It would be fascinating to hear how the company plans to use its cash to tackle the enterprise.
It will also be interesting to see how it fares against Zimbra. There was a possibility of Zimbra getting buried in the Yahoo! mess, but the opposite seems to have happened. Zimbra's business has accelerated within Yahoo!, making life a bit more difficult for Open-Xchange.
A little over a year ago Yahoo! acquired open-source messaging company Zimbra for $350 million, but it's only now starting to launch products based on Zimbra's technology. As All Things Digital reports, Yahoo! just updated its calendar service after nearly a decade, and is using Zimbra to power it:
The new Yahoo calendar is built on the Zimbra platform, which uses Ajax functionality in its online calendars and iCalendar (iCal) and CalDAV3 standards. That makes it interoperable with other online calendar services, including those from Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, Time Warner's AOL and Google.
It's great to see Zimbra being put to good use, but it begs the question as to what Yahoo!'s plans are for Zimbra, generally. The improved calendar is nice, but when will we get to see Zimbra's technology throughout Yahoo!'s collaboration products?
When Yahoo! acquired Zimbra, some saw it as a way for Yahoo! to compete with Google Apps, what with its open APIs that enable Zimbra to be connected to just about everything:
Yahoo is aiming to create a more open platform, using APIs and mashups across multiple Yahoo properties (e.g. Yahoo Maps). Yahoo executive Brad Garlinghouse wrote in a post this week that he sees "great opportunities to incorporate some of their [Zimbra's] best-of-breed features (I really like their calendaring) into Yahoo!'s industry-leading communications products." But it's not just Yahoo's comms products that will benefit, it's basically anything with an API - and Yahoo has a lot of APIs, including for Y! Mail.
So, is this move with the calendar the first of many? If so, Yahoo! has been very quiet about it. Zimbra has been busy as a standalone Yahoo! business, continuing to build momentum with its enterprise email and collaboration product, replacing Microsoft Exchange at universities, governments, and enterprises. Still, I suspect Yahoo! intended for Zimbra to be more than just a successful-but-separate division. Hopefully this revised calendar is a sign of good (Zimbra-based) things to come at Yahoo!.
Zimbra just closed a deal with XMission, Utah's largest Internet service provider. As part of the deal, XMission will be moving customers who host e-mail with XMission to Zimbra.
It's not necessarily a huge deal, not like Comcast's decision to use Zimbra was. Even so, I like the deal because it demonstrates Zimbra's continued focus on ubiquity.
Zimbra's per-user pricing with ISPs isn't high. But that's the point. Zimbra has always focused on making it affordable for ISPs to seriously upgrade their e-mail offerings with its Web-based Microsoft Exchange replacement. Adoption first, and revenue follows.
Zimbra has been one of the burning, bright lights of open source. It's too bad that it was acquired by Yahoo before it had time to prove just how well it could do. Now that its sales are rolled up into Yahoo's total top-line number, we'll never really know just how disruptive it may prove to be with this ubiquity play.
