On Jan 31, 2010, at 4:37 PM, Douglas McAdam wrote:
I cannot quite see why Apple allowed it to die or why in some way,
by someone, it has not been restored. Surely there are computer
genius out there who can redo this wonderful mailer.
Apple killed off all of Claris with two exceptions.
1: ClarisWorks. They renamed it AppleWorks and held it because they
needed a simple, cheap, productivity tool available for the Mac so
people could do basic home and office work. Making them spend $400 for
MS Office was not an acceptable solution. Note they still offer this
kind of a product in the form of iWork, and notice the iPad
announcement came with an announcement of iWork for the iPad, for the
exact same reason, it needed a simple cheap productivity solution.
2: Filemaker. This was spun off to its own company and kept purely
because it was very profitable. In the simple database market on the
Mac there was really only one solution, Filemaker (there were other
products, but Filemaker ruled the market). Even on Windows you had
only two that dominated the market, Access, which came with MS Office,
and Filemaker. Access is much harder to design and use then Filemaker
so Filemaker even had (has) a good market share on Windows. So it got
to live on as its own company.
Everything else by Claris was axed, including Emailer. There was no
value to keeping any of it and this was a time that Apple needed to do
some major refocusing of the entire company. So anything that wasn't
either directly profitable and/or had a distinct market value was
killed. This wasn't limited just to Claris. The entire Newton team was
shut down right after a major OS upgrade and new lines were released.
Several Mac models were also dropped as was the clone market.
In the end, Emailer was a tragedy of simple business needs. It didn't
hurt any that OS X was in the works and there was an existing NeXT
mail client that would be easier to port to OS X then Emailer was
going to be. MS had nothing to do with killing emailer even though we
all want to believe it and blame them. MS never cared about the Mac
email market, they cared about the Windows market and really they
cared about Exchange, controlling the mail client on windows was just
a way to push people towards the more lucrative Exchange Server. Heck,
they didn't even add Mac support for Exchange until a more recent
Entourage release. MS only cared about the browser market (and at the
time of the deal with MS, Netscape was bumped in favor of IE being the
default Mac web browser, dropping emailer for Outlook Express was just
a nice throw in for MS and convenient for Apple).
As for why no one has recreated Emailer in OS X.
1: No one has the rights to use the source code
2: Even with the source code, porting it to OS X would likely be a
nightmare
3: No market value in doing the work to port or simply rewrite. No
market value = no money to be made = not worth spending a huge effort
to do it. Look at the email market on the Mac, you have Mail.app. If
you don't want that, you have Thunderbird that is free, if you don't
want that, you have PowerMail which is paid, if you don't want that,
there are other options free or paid, each one getting less and less
market and less and less generated revenue. How much time do you thing
it would take to rewrite Emailer as an OS X native app? 200 man hours?
1000? I honestly have no idea, but I do know it isn't a weekend of
work, it is likely months of work for someone to do. What is the
return going to be? Release it for free? Sell it? How many copies will
be sold? 50? 100? 1000? At what, $35, $50? The economics just aren't
there, not in a market that already has several good established email
applications. And that doesn't even touch on the fact that the
PowerMail developers also liked eMailer and have made a point of
trying to include the best features in their mail client while still
maintaining a modern application with modern features.
I could be wrong on the economics, it might turn out to be a great
deal for someone. But on the surface it doesn't seem like it, thus it
is very hard for someone to leap in to doing it.
We all want eMailer back, but I just don't see it is ever going to
happen. I know I am never going to write it.
-chris
<www.mythtech.net>
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