I previously informed you that Mozilla was looking to free itself of Thunderbird. They’ve finally done it. It’s been spun off as its own for profit company.
The result is that Mozilla is launching a new effort to improve email and internet communications. We will increase our investment and focus on our current email client — Thunderbird — and on innovations in the email and communications areas. We are doing so by creating a new organization with this as its sole focus and committing resources to this organization. The new organization doesn’t have a name yet, so I’ll call it MailCo here. MailCo will be part of the Mozilla Foundation and will serve the public benefit mission of the Mozilla Foundation. (Technically, it will be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, just like the Mozilla Corporation.)
Ah, so MailCo is the dumping ground for what has, as yet, been an unprofitable program. While their choice of David Ascher is a smart one, I’m still not sure why splitting off a new company will suddenly bestow the ability to derive profit onto Thunderbird. I’m more concerned about the long term survivability of this new company.
Mozilla will provide an initial $3 million dollars in seed funding to launch MailCo. This is expected to be spent mostly on building a small team of people who are passionate about email and Internet communications. As MailCo develops it and the Mozilla Foundation will evaluate what’s the best model for long-term sustainability. Mozilla may well invest additional funds; we also hope that there are other paths for sustainability.
That part just sends a message straight to my brain that says “they’re setting the company up for failure”. Given enough time, it seems very likely they’ll run out of the seed money, at which point, Mozilla can throw up their hands in resignation without looking like the bad guy. I hate to seem so negative, but this behavior just seems out of place for a company looking to sustain an existing product.
I would suggest that they may achieve profitability sooner by charging for their product. I don't mind paying for an email client which has the features I need, but I am definitely not interested in some kind of ad-supported mode or having Google ads all over it.
The whole “Mozilla making money” just blows me away, and I think there has to be more to it than meets the eye. But if I were to take it for face value, they get their revenue from advertisement (small percentage?), donations (a bit larger percentage?), and google searches (majority?). Heck, maybe even from trinkets and t-shirts, but not very much in the grand scheme of things. So, the more market share, the more users using the default search option (google), the more people bringing in money for Mozilla. I believe this to be their staple diet. That capability is just not part of an email client, therefore no profit involved. Nothing is truly free. There is always a subsidizer. Giving out Thunderbird would be truly free, or at least a fringe benefit of the *other* part of Mozilla. Hence, the spinning off Thunderbird.
Not to mention Mozilla's biggest source of revenue (GOOG) would much rather you use their web-based email client so you can click on their own revenue bringing ads.
Bringing Thunderbird to the for-profit model just wouldn't cut it for anyone wishing to grow beyond the income generation of the shareware realm. This is what Mozilla requires. There is only one truly commercial, millions of dollars of profit email client and we all know who that is. The other major player is the default one everyone has. Everything else is going to be shareware or less. And I'm not dissing shareware. There are quality shareware apps out there that can be equal to the big commercial ones in features, and maybe sport features that commercial ones don't. Those single-to-few- person/people architectures are able to make a decent living off that revenue, but that revenue wouldn't be even worth considering for companies with large aspirations such as Mozilla or Google.