What do Zimbra, Knol and MobileMe have in common? All three have come out in the past month, all from companies that have loyal customers and solid revenues, and all three are dogs. Yahoo, Google, and Apple should know better: don’t push something out the door before it is baked. I’ve tried them all, and while I haven’t spent tons of time to review them, I have seen enough to know that none of them are ready for real customers.
Zimbra is Yahoo’s answer to a desktop email client, like Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, or something similar. It allows you to combine a variety of Web-based emailers like Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and AOL (remember them? I know, there are still a few people in my life that insist on using AOL, try to be kind to them and not sneer) into one unified inbox. The trouble is, it is a product that would have been innovative say back in 1997 or 1998. But today? Nope. Gmail does a terrific job organizing my email, and can collect emails from other systems, too.
Yahoo’s email software has always been a day late and a dollar short, sorry guys. Icahn doesn’t love you for your email – indeed, if he ever did use a computer, that would probably be the last email product he would pick up. It is clunky, the user interface (both the classic one and the current one) are used in classes on bad design principles, and when you have to manage multiple accounts it bogs down like quicksand. Into this environment we have a solution: let’s develop a client emailer! Well, at least give them points for diversity training: it comes in Mac, Windows, and Linux flavors. But a dressed up pig still stinks.
I also don’t want to go back to a desktop email client for several reasons: First, because I use several computers during the course of my average day, and when I am on the road I don’t want to have to bring my laptop and fight through the TSA screening lines and cart it up and down concourses and escalators ad infinitum. Second, because I have forgotten how to set up POP and IMAP mail servers and don’t want to have to dig out my book (which I wrote with Marshall Rose back in 1998) to remember how to do it. Finally, I don’t want to have to backup my desktop email archive: having it sorted out by Google’s Gmail means I don’t have to deal with this chore. Scratch Zimbra.
MobileMe is Apple’s latest incarnation to its dot Mac service. It’s failures have been well documented, and it has been amusing to watch Apple stumble on this one. Again, give them some points for having both a Windows and Mac versions, but they didn’t quite get it right: the Windows version doesn’t run on Internet Explorer. Hunh? What reality distortion field were you living in, Steve baby? I mean, what do you expect all those Windows users to do, move over to Safari or Firefox just to run your nifty software? I even said Apple’s choice of nomenclature was prophetic: remember Windows Me, the version that lasted all of a few months before Microsoft realized what a dog it was? MobileMe is the Apple version for the rest of us.
And now we have Google’s attempt at creating another Wikipedia with Knol. Isn’t one Wiki-tiki-web site enough for our universe? And I mean the good folks over there all due respect. I like Wikipedia, it is responsible for endless hours of amusement and resolving pivotal factual arguments in my life. Granted, Knol has some nifty name verification features, so that you can at least have some clue who is writing all that free content and whether you want to trust them when you have to cut and paste it into your next term paper. But I couldn’t verify my name using either with a credit card or phone number, probably because I have just moved and the addresses aren’t on file. Oh well.
But more importantly, why oh why would Google get into the content creation business just to piss off every one of their advertising partners? It doesn’t make any AdSense. Some have already claimed that Google IS in the content business already, we just haven’t been paying attention. I will leave that argument for another day.
Knol, MobileMe, and Zimbra are all cases of bad products coming from otherwise good companies. Notice I didn’t draw any parallels to any number of past Microsoft products, like Bob, Vista, DOS 4, or even MSN for that matter. Remember those?
If you have your favorite bad-product-from-good-company story, please share.
This essay also ran on Pajamas Media this week here.
Are you crazy ? Dude – chill out and take some lessons on how to use emails. With Zimbra, you dont have to go back to your classroom notes that you thought you had taken. Its simple interface lets you figure things out for setting up pop and imap. Yeah, I am sure Zimbra thought about people like you dont like notes (or never took notes in your life)
Man, you seem to have gone into a slumber for last 20 yrs and maybe just woke up. Gmail has nothing innovative other than conversation and its AJAX. In fact, they did nothing in the last 5 yrs which could call “innovative”. Go ahead and take Zimbra for a test ride and decide for yourself
And BTW, how the hell are you going to read your emails when you are offline ? Pls post here when Gmail allows you do that … oh I know, you dont care about it but I am damn sure that you will be the first one calling out how innovative google is when it introduces an offline client … let us say a bit too late in the game …
David,
While you might like to think Zimbra Desktop is a dog, it may only be a dog (or a pig) to you because you haven’t realized yet it’s a workhorse. The product is called Zimbra Desktop, not Zimbra. It’s ironic that you complain it’s an offline browser for an online world, given that Zimbra itself is all about being online, and Zimbra Desktop was only developed as an off-line component.
If you want to try out “Zimbra” itself, you can free-of-charge with some of the orgs on Zimbra’s hosting provider list, like 01.com, who has auto-activation.
Zimbra does not require Zimbra Desktop. An open-source based groupware server, Zimbra is a competitor to Google Apps and Microsoft Exchange. You can access your Zimbra mailbox, including mail, calendars, contacts, files, task lists and more stuff, right through the web, and unlike Google Apps, it feels like a true application, with drag-and-drop functionality.
It syncs with most smart phones, including activesync support for over-the-air sync with iPhones, and native blackberry bes support. And it syncs with desktop software, unlike Google Apps, syncing calendars, contacts, tasks and email with Outlook. Unlike Exchange, it also syncs well with the Mac side, although I use it with Thunderbird as my client on both Mac and Windows, which syncs calendars using CalDav and the Lightning extension.
Zimbra Desktop was originally meant to work with Zimbra, as the off-line client for Zimbra’s web access, although Zimbra Desktop can be used independently, as you have delighted. Where you might fault Yahoo! is in trying to take excellent software made for one thing, and arbitrarily introducing it to a wider audience for another without anticipating your review. You can’t blame them for trying though, Zimbra Desktop is a first, pushing the limit of what can be done offline within a browser, and Yahoo! needs some firsts, and it probably does need to showcase Zimbra.
How best to showcase Zimbra? I don’t know. I’m a nerd, not a marketeer.
David,
I’m with you. I just want an easy place to check my email when wandering around. I don’t care for the big cell phones (iPhone, Windows mobile, crackberry, etc.), but like a very small flip phone. With Google mobile, I can check all my email without any big hassles. What’s cool about Google is you can set it up to reply as if it came from the email address it collected (I have 3 right now). And it’s fast. I can load the application and pull down all my email in less than 20 seconds fast. And I can T9 pretty darn fast for a quick reply.
I’m thinking about using an iPod touch as my laptop substitute when traveling. Great ideas here:
http://lifehacker.com/399619/forget-the-iphone++the-ipod-touch-is-good-enough