Hello Gleason, Sunday, October 14, 2007, 3:19:49 PM, you scribbled:
GP> Yes, as I said a while ago, the success of Tbird is one of the issues GP> that Rit must deal with very soon. And I think glitter is very much a GP> part of Tbird's appeal. TBird is not glitter. It is a barebones, functional IMAP/POP client. You can glitz it up with themes and extensions, but the program itself is simple, it works and the average person can slide right into it. That is the appeal, the learning curve is not steep. Glitter, now your talking Pocomail. TB! and Pocomail share the same problem... to many moving parts for the average computer user, too many buttons and options to play with (and screw up). Joe Normal just wants to send and receive e-mail comfortably and reliably, that's it. TB! is aimed at a different user group than TBird. TB!'s market is (or should be) the corporate market, small/home business user and any professional that requires the advanced features TB! has to offer. TBird, according to it's devs (I'll find a quote when I have a chance) was intended to compete with OE for the average home user who just needs a basic e-mail client. The folks TB! is losing, I believe, are those who realize that it is too much for them. There are more features than need or care to figure out. They can go to TBird, set it up in seconds, hit send/receive, reply to Mom and they're done 'til tomorrow, why pay for TB! when TBird is free and much simpler? GP> Actually, TB is not going to be simple, and people who have a lot of GP> special email needs don't want it to be. The problem is that this is GP> a rather small part of the overall email client market, and there are GP> 10-15 other clients all aiming for that same group. TB really needs GP> to stand out. Appearance is an important part of that. See above, TB! should not be aiming for the same user group that TBird does. In your own words "people who have special e-mail needs...", that is TB!'s niche, not Ma and Pa Kettle who get 1 or 2 e-mails a day from the kids. Let Mozilla and MS fight over them... Unfortunately for RITLabs, (other than the fact that they have a crappy web site), they do not seem to be marketing towards the commercial sector very heavily. I know my company execs love the TB!/Voyager combo, however, reliability on the IMAP side makes it a nonstarter. We use our own IMAP server with WebDAV for shared info. For us, it is a lot more flexible than Exchange for the road warrior -- Regards, Mike TheBat! 3.99.25 on Windows Vista ________________________________________________________ Current beta is (none) | 'Using TBBETA' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
