Mozilla have announced that they are to launch a major investment drive into revamping Thunderbird’s e-mailing capabilities. Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, has announced that Mozilla will be creating a new company to focus on emailing and messaging which will initially be known as ‘MailCo’.
Baker announced on his blog:
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.
Baker says that the main aims of MailCo will be to move Thunderbird forwards to provide better, deeper email solutions, create a better user experience for a range of Internet communications and encourage increased community involvement on the net. But how exactly are Mozilla going to do this? One option is to make Thunderbird a completely web based application and incorporate many of the functions that have made Gmail and Yahoo! Mail so popular. A key to achieving their aims would be taking a closer look at how people are starting to communicate using online applications such as Facebook and MySpace. If Mozilla can somehow adapt these principles for Thunderbird, then they could be onto a winner.
