Odysseus, "Eudora style email client"

On 8/27/08 3:56 AM, "David Silbey" <silbeysilbey.net> wrote:

>> That's funny, because in terms of pure numbers of email clients,
>> there's a
>> TON of competition in the Mac OS X Mac OS X space, in fact, a good
>> deal more
>> than there was in Mac OS 9 days.
>
> Is there? Could I see some evidence of that, like a link?

I counted, and you have to include the "Unix" clients, X11 clients. There
are really a small number of OS9 - era clients that didn't make it into OS
X. IIRC, Cyberdog, Outlook 2000, & Emailer, (which KIND of made it) being
the biggest two. I *think* quickmail hung on, or tried to, but finally got
put to pasture.

However, you've still got Eudora, Powermail, Mulberry (sort of),
Netscape/Mozilla, Entourage, (which can be legitimately thought of as
Emailer's grandchild), Notes (ugh). In addition,

Mail.app
Gyaz
Thunderbird
Evolution
Pine
Groupwise (may have had an OS 9 client)

>
> In addition, "pure numbers of email clients" seems to me a bad way to
> measure things. Market share seems much more critical. Ten (or 20 or
> whatever) clients evenly sharing the space strikes me as much more
> competitive than ten clients (or 20 or whatever) with one of them
> holding the lion's share of the market.

No, market share shows you how well a given client is doing. For pure
"competition", it's all about the numbers of players. The fact that some are
doing really well, and others are not in terms of market share doesn't mean
they aren't there.

>
> But in any case your point is largely non-responsive to what I
> actually said. My point was not about the total market but about the
> paying market, which is why I said a "free email
> client ...substantially reduces the market of people who will pay for
> such a program." That's a problem in one major way: without a
> financially rewarding and competitive market, there's little incentive
> for people to get into it with different or innovative solutions.
> Witness how most email programs are converging on a single pane
> interface. In this case, at least imitation isn't necessarily leading
> to greatness. But there simply isn't the money in the email client
> for anyone to try doing anything daring/nonstandard/etc.

The paying market is a part of the overall market, and a small one. The
problem isn't that a pay client cannot succeed. There are a small number
that do, Entourage being the biggest. What isn't going to work is an email
client that doesn't give you a real reason to buy it. Eudora didn't offer
much of a reason to pay for it. Being "different', but not really offering
anything that you can't get elsewhere for free is not creating a reason to
pay. If Eudora had given people more of a reason to pay, the sales would
have been much better.

However, there is money in that market. You just have to give people actual
value for that money. Simply providing great POP and SMTP along with
mediocre IMAP isn't going to do it.

Just because Eudora failed as a pay client doesn't mean there's no money in
it.

>
>> Eudora however, was *far* less hurt by more competition than by
>> Qualcomm
>> abandoning any work on it but the minimum required to keep it
>> working with
>> whatever version of the OS was current at the time, all the while
>> keep the
>> Windows version supplied with regular updates.
>
> I never said any different. Qualcomm dug the grave for Eudora.
>
>> I eagerly await the cries of "OMG, BLOAT" when a
>> feature is added that person A wants but person B does not.
>
> Having to make up how people *may* respond to back up your point is
> not an effective way to develop an argument.

It's not made up at all. Ask anyone who writes a program that's survived
several major updates. Any time you add a feature that customer A wants, and
Customer B does not, the *vast* majority of the time, Customer B is going to
scream about bloat, solely because a feature they don't want is in their
way, and OBVIOUSLY, the only reason for it to be there is that some
programmer wanted to bloat up the product.

I didn't even have to write that last part myself. It's a collection of
complaints on TidBITS about software from Apple, Adobe, Microsoft,
Macromedia et al. IIRC, I think I can even add BBEdit to that list. Carlin's
4th law of Stuff states this clearly, albeit cleaned up for TidBITs:

"Have you ever noticed that your cruft is stuff and other people's stuff is
cruft?"

Heck, just notice the screams when people have suggested that Eudora on the
Mac would do well with a true 3-paned interface. OMG SKY IS FALLING.
Ya, Rly.

--
John C. Welch

On Aug 27, 2008, at 12:56 AM, David Silbey wrote:

>> That's funny, because in terms of pure numbers of email clients,
>> there's a
>> TON of competition in the Mac OS X Mac OS X space, in fact, a good
>> deal more
>> than there was in Mac OS 9 days.
>
> Is there? Could I see some evidence of that, like a link?

Here are the e-mail programs that I know of for OS X:

Outspring Mail ($95)
http://www.outspring.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=64

Correo (free and open source)
POP and IMAP email client. Correo blends technology from two popular
Mozilla projects, Camino and Thunderbird, to create a polished native
Macintosh application.
http://nkreeger.com/correo/

PowerMail ($49)
http://www.ctmdev.com

GyazMail ($18)
http://www.gyazsquare.com/gyazmail/
This e-mail program specializes in speed, stability & data
protection. A lot of people prefer its user interface, which is very
similiar to Outlook Express' and Claris Emailer's. It's biggest claim
to fame is that it stores all of its e-mail messages (according to
RFC spec) in individual files on your hard drive - so you don't have
to worry about corruption of a huge monolithic e-mail database.

QuickMail ($35)
http://www.outspring.com/index.php?
option=com_content&task=view&id=26&Itemid=62

CleverCactus (free, JAVA based, includes PIM functionality)
http://www.clevercactus.com/pro.html

Namera (free? gone?)
http://homepage.mac.com/namera/

SweetMail (free)
http://www.tobiasjung.net/html/sm_download_en.php
http://www.tobiasjung.net/html/sweetmail.php
http://www.tobiasjung.net/html/sm_download.php

Balzac
http://www.mecanisme.net/software/balzac/

Nisus Email ($30)
http://www.nisus.com/NisusEmail/

Thunderbird (free, open source)
http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/

Mulberry (free)
http://www.mulberrymail.com/index.shtml

Musashi ($25)
http://www.macorchard.com/email/Musashi.php
http://www.sonosoft.com/musashi.html

MailSmith ($99)
http://www.barebones.com/products/mailsmith.html

Ginko (FREE, open source)
http://www.objectpark.org/Ginko.html

GNUMail (FREE, open source)
http://www.collaboration-world.com/gnumail/

Eudora (free, but no longer being developed)
http://www.eudora.com/email/index.html

Odysseus (successor to Eudora)
http://www.infinitydatasystems.com/odysseus/index.html
<http://www.infinitydatasystems.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=1>

Penelope (another successor to Eudora)
http://eudora-penelope.en.softonic.com/mac

MailPlane (Mac front end for Gmail)
http://mailplane.en.softonic.com/mac

Entourage (comes with Microsoft Office)
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/entourage2008/default.mspx#/
interacting_

Magellan Pro ($35)
http://www.makienterprise.com/magellanpro/magellanpro.html

HogWasher (A supremely powerful newsgroup reader combined with full e-
mail capabilities. $49)
http://www.asar.com/hogwasher.html

PolarBar Mailer (A FREE open-source Java e-mail client that is
surprisingly full-featured. Both POP and IMAP support.)
http://polarbar.netfang.net/

Pine/Alpine (free)
http://www.washington.edu/pine/
http://www.washington.edu/alpine/
http://www.osxgnu.org/software/pkgdetail.html?project_id=228&cat_id=203
http://www.madboa.com/geek/pine-macosx/

MacSOUP ($20)
http://home.snafu.de/stk/macsoup/index.html
It has offline newsreading, powerful killfile
and filtering with regular expressions, intuitive graphical thread view,
true references based threading

Randy B. Singer • Mac OS X Routine Maintenance • http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

On 27-Aug-2008, at 23:51, Randy B. Singer wrote:
> Here are the e-mail programs that I know of for OS X:


There are also various webmail programs that one can install on OS X
and use to access your email, including Squirrelmail and Roundcube.
Not to mention the various command line mail readers (mutt, pine,
emacs, etc [I mean, I don't know for sure that emacs does email, but
supposedly it does *everything* so it would have to, right?])

 the "Unix" clients, X11 clients. There
are really a small number of OS9 - era clients that didn't make it into OS
X. IIRC, Cyberdog, Outlook 2000, & Emailer, (which KIND of made it) being
the biggest two. I *think* quickmail hung on, or tried to, but finally got
put to pasture.

However, you've still got Eudora, Powermail, Mulberry (sort of),
Netscape/Mozilla, Entourage, (which can be legitimately thought of as
Emailer's grandchild), Notes (ugh). In addition,

Mail.app
Gyaz
Thunderbird
Evolution
Pine

Groupwise (may have had an OS 9 client)

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

On Aug 28, 2008, at 5:04 AM, <tidbits-talktidbits.com> <tidbits-talktidbits.com
 > wrote:
> Message #41: Re: Odysseus, "Eudora style email client"
> Posted by: John C. Welch Date: Aug 27, 2008.
>
> On 8/27/08 3:56 AM, "David Silbey" <silbeysilbey.net> wrote:
>
> >> That's funny, because in terms of pure numbers of email clients,
> >> there's a
> >> TON of competition in the Mac OS X Mac OS X space, in fact, a good
> >> deal more
> >> than there was in Mac OS 9 days.
> >
> > Is there? Could I see some evidence of that, like a link?
>
> I counted, and you have to include the "Unix" clients, X11 clients.
> There
> are really a small number of OS9 - era clients that didn't make it
> into OS
> X. IIRC, Cyberdog, Outlook 2000, & Emailer, (which KIND of made it)
> being
> the biggest two. I *think* quickmail hung on, or tried to, but
> finally got
> put to pasture.
>
I don't think Outlook Express made it to OS X either, or SweetMail.
> However, you've still got Eudora, Powermail, Mulberry (sort of),
> Netscape/Mozilla, Entourage, (which can be legitimately thought of as
> Emailer's grandchild), Notes (ugh).
>
Eudora's dead and Mulberry's source has been released by the developer.
> In addition,
>
> Mail.app
> Gyaz
> Thunderbird
> Evolution
> Pine
> Groupwise (may have had an OS 9 client)
>
So there are six email programs that pioneered with OS X and five that
were OS 9 only. The difference of one is what you call a "good deal
more" competition in OS X?

> > In addition, "pure numbers of email clients" seems to me a bad way
> to
> > measure things. Market share seems much more critical. Ten (or 20 or
> > whatever) clients evenly sharing the space strikes me as much more
> > competitive than ten clients (or 20 or whatever) with one of them
> > holding the lion's share of the market.
>
> No, market share shows you how well a given client is doing. For pure
> "competition", it's all about the numbers of players. The fact that
> some are
> doing really well, and others are not in terms of market share
> doesn't mean
> they aren't there.
>
That's quite a silly remark. So even if one program had a 99% share
and the others had the remaining 1%, the market would be more
competitive than a market with fewer clients but a less imbalanced
market breakdown? Teddy Roosevelt would not have agreed with you,
though the heads of Standard Oil might have. The Department of
Justice used to think differently with Microsoft.

And, in fact, the browser market is a good example. It's a lot more
competitive now that IE doesn't have a 90%+ market share, irrespective
of how many browser clients there are.
> The paying market is a part of the overall market, and a small one.
>
Yes, that was my point. It's a small part because the oxygen gets
sucked out by the free clients, just like they have in the browser
market.
> Just because Eudora failed as a pay client doesn't mean there's no
> money in
>
> it.
>
I note the floods of people jumping into the email client market (or
the browser market for that matter).

The simple fact is that releasing a free client that is Good Enough
(tm) makes it much more difficult to make money in a particular area,
because you have to beat that functionality by quite a bit in order to
earn any money at all.
> It's not made up at all. Ask anyone who writes a program that's
> survived
> several major updates. Any time you add a feature that customer A
> wants, and
> Customer B does not, the *vast* majority of the time, Customer B is
> going to
> scream about bloat, solely because a feature they don't want is in
> their
> way, and OBVIOUSLY, the only reason for it to be there is that some
> programmer wanted to bloat up the product.
>
Of course it's made up. Unless "Customer A" and "Customer B" are real
names, then you are imagining a scenario and holding it up as evidence.

> On Aug 27, 2008, at 12:56 AM, David Silbey wrote:
>
> >> That's funny, because in terms of pure numbers of email clients,
> >> there's a
> >> TON of competition in the Mac OS X Mac OS X space, in fact, a good
> >> deal more
> >> than there was in Mac OS 9 days.
> >
> > Is there? Could I see some evidence of that, like a link?
>
> Here are the e-mail programs that I know of for OS X:
>
>

Randy was kind enough to list the OS X email programs, which is half
the evidence needed. Anybody have a similar list for the Classic Mac
OS?

cheers,
David Silbey

On 8/30/08 6:12 AM, "David Silbey" <silbeysilbey.net> wrote:

> I don't think Outlook Express made it to OS X either, or SweetMail.

Outlook Express became Entourage in OS 9, and was left there.

>> However, you've still got Eudora, Powermail, Mulberry (sort of),
>> Netscape/Mozilla, Entourage, (which can be legitimately thought of as
>> Emailer's grandchild), Notes (ugh).
>>
> Eudora's dead and Mulberry's source has been released by the developer.

Mulberry's still around and still usable, with, from what I understand,
fewer problems than Eudora.

>> In addition,
>>
>> Mail.app
>> Gyaz
>> Thunderbird
>> Evolution
>> Pine
>> Groupwise (may have had an OS 9 client)
>>
> So there are six email programs that pioneered with OS X and five that
> were OS 9 only. The difference of one is what you call a "good deal
> more" competition in OS X?

Let's see...6+5 == 11, and I left a few out that are mosx only. Even so,
that's almost twice the number of available email clients than were on OS 9.
Yes. Yes, I do in fact call an almost 2x increase in the number of email
clients a good deal more competition.


>
>>> In addition, "pure numbers of email clients" seems to me a bad way
>> to
>>> measure things. Market share seems much more critical. Ten (or 20 or
>>> whatever) clients evenly sharing the space strikes me as much more
>>> competitive than ten clients (or 20 or whatever) with one of them
>>> holding the lion's share of the market.
>>
>> No, market share shows you how well a given client is doing. For pure
>> "competition", it's all about the numbers of players. The fact that
>> some are
>> doing really well, and others are not in terms of market share
>> doesn't mean
>> they aren't there.
>>
> That's quite a silly remark. So even if one program had a 99% share
> and the others had the remaining 1%, the market would be more
> competitive than a market with fewer clients but a less imbalanced
> market breakdown? Teddy Roosevelt would not have agreed with you,
> though the heads of Standard Oil might have. The Department of
> Justice used to think differently with Microsoft.

Well, if you want to seriously look at overall market share, it's all
Outlook, case closed. Market share alone is the worst way to decide if a
market is thriving, because dominant market share is not always created by
chicanery. For example, who owns the illustration market? Adobe. Who owns
Photo editing? Adobe. Who has the dominant market share in publishing?
Adobe.

If you want to assume all dominance is because of unethical activity, then
ye gods man, quick, start a lawsuit against Adobe!

It would be silly, because as it turns out, even though the company makes my
teeth grind, they do good work in an area that is really hard to do good
work in. There are smaller programs that do *some* of what Photoshop will
do, but almost none that can touch Illustrator, and I looked.

Heck, you want what is effectively a single company market? Traditional
media illustration. That's Painter. Artrage is okay to start with, but if
you want the full breadth of replicating traditional media on a computer,
it's Painter all the way. Why? Because that kind of thing is really hard to
do.

So spare me the "monopoly is bad" argument, it's an overly simplistic view.

As well, the fact that one program has a clearly dominant market share does
not in fact mean there's no competition. It may mean they're just doing it
better than everyone else.

>
> And, in fact, the browser market is a good example. It's a lot more
> competitive now that IE doesn't have a 90%+ market share, irrespective
> of how many browser clients there are.

It still has a clear majority market share. So since all you care about is
market share, there's no real competition, because no one in the web browser
market is within 40% of IE's market share, and if you look at corporate web
use, IE stands almost alone.

Was all of that done above board? No. Did Netscape however assist by
shooting itself in the foot between around 1998 and Firefox? Oh yes and with
great enthusiasm.

However, had Mozilla, Opera et al looked only at Market share, they would
have said, "It's hopeless" and given up. Yet they didn't, and a good thing
too. Sometimes, the smaller player brings something new to the table, and
market share shifts.

>> The paying market is a part of the overall market, and a small one.
>>
> Yes, that was my point. It's a small part because the oxygen gets
> sucked out by the free clients, just like they have in the browser
> market.

And because the pay clients get lazy. What does Eudora have that is
*significantly better* than the free clients, enough to make it worth 50
bucks or so?

>> Just because Eudora failed as a pay client doesn't mean there's no
>> money in
>>
>> it.
>>
> I note the floods of people jumping into the email client market (or
> the browser market for that matter).

A search for "email client" on version tracker brings in 21 hits that are
legitimate email clients. Not all of them are for free, and that's an
imcomplete list. Looks like a pretty open market to me.

>
> The simple fact is that releasing a free client that is Good Enough
> (tm) makes it much more difficult to make money in a particular area,
> because you have to beat that functionality by quite a bit in order to
> earn any money at all.

That's kind of what Eudora's problem was. It didn't give you a good reason
to pay for it beyond "Hey, it's EUDORA!"

>> It's not made up at all. Ask anyone who writes a program that's
>> survived
>> several major updates. Any time you add a feature that customer A
>> wants, and
>> Customer B does not, the *vast* majority of the time, Customer B is
>> going to
>> scream about bloat, solely because a feature they don't want is in
>> their
>> way, and OBVIOUSLY, the only reason for it to be there is that some
>> programmer wanted to bloat up the product.
>>
> Of course it's made up. Unless "Customer A" and "Customer B" are real
> names, then you are imagining a scenario and holding it up as evidence.

I'm paraphrasing conversations with dozens of developers from Adobe, MS,
Corel, and Apple.

>
>> On Aug 27, 2008, at 12:56 AM, David Silbey wrote:
>>
>>>> That's funny, because in terms of pure numbers of email clients,
>>>> there's a
>>>> TON of competition in the Mac OS X Mac OS X space, in fact, a good
>>>> deal more
>>>> than there was in Mac OS 9 days.
>>>
>>> Is there? Could I see some evidence of that, like a link?
>>
>> Here are the e-mail programs that I know of for OS X:
>>
>>
>
> Randy was kind enough to list the OS X email programs, which is half
> the evidence needed. Anybody have a similar list for the Classic Mac
> OS?

Versiontracker lists 9, some of which you can't get anymore.

--
John C. Welch

--On August 30, 2008 8:58:30 AM -0700 "John C. Welch" <jwelchbynkii.com>
wrote:

>> Eudora's dead and Mulberry's source has been released by the developer.
>
> Mulberry's still around and still usable, with, from what I understand,
> fewer problems than Eudora.

I still use Mulberry. The look is a bit archaic but it's a solid program
and has worked for me for years from OS 9 to the Intel OS 10.5.4 that I run
now.

I use it with an imap server. I currently have over 9.5 GB of mail stored.

<http://www.mulberrymail.com/>

Although it's been a while since a new binary release has been made, you
can browse the source at the site above and the last code check-in was only
2 months ago so it is still being worked on.

> Let's see...6+5 == 11, and I left a few out that are mosx only. Even
> so,
> that's almost twice the number of available email clients than were
> on OS 9.
> Yes. Yes, I do in fact call an almost 2x increase in the number of
> email
> clients a good deal more competition.

I'm not sure where you're getting 11, so I'm going to stick with 6.5.
That's not a substantial number more than in OS 9 and certainly not a
"good deal more" competition.

> Well, if you want to seriously look at overall market share, it's all
> Outlook, case closed. Market share alone is the worst way to decide
> if a
> market is thriving, because dominant market share is not always
> created by
> chicanery.

You're changing your measure. "Thriving" is not the same thing as
"competitive." In addition, we're talking about Mac market share, not
overall market share (why else compare OS X to the Classic Mac OS?),
so Outlook's market share is irrelevant.

> If you want to assume all dominance is because of unethical activity

What on earth are you talking about? I've never even mentioned ethics
as a measure. The conversation was whether a market was competitive
or not.

> So spare me the "monopoly is bad" argument, it's an overly
> simplistic view.

You're again reacting to something I didn't say. You're conflating
"competitive/non-competitive" with "good/bad." I'm not making the
same connection.

To return to my actual point, the raw number of applications in a
market space is not necessarily a good reflection of how competitive
that market is. Much more critical is how much market share each
application has. A market dominated by one application is much less
competitive than one that's not. That's why it's called (as you did
yourself) a 'monopoly.' Whether that's bad or good depends largely on
other factors.

>> It still has a clear majority market share. So since all you care
>> about is
>> market share, there's no real competition,

I'm not sure whose position you're arguing with, but it isn't mine.
This is not a all or nothing competitive/not competitive situation.
Is the browser market as competitive as it could be? Given IE's
continuing dominance, I wouldn't think so. Is it more competitive
than when IE had 90%+ market share? Of course it is. Even having
said that, of course, it's not competitive in the sense that companies
can _sell_ their browsers. The paid browser market has essentially
disappeared because of the free clients, just as it is the process of
doing with the email market.

Are you _really_ arguing that the browser market was just as
competitive when IE had 90%+ as it is now? Really?

> A search for "email client" on version tracker brings in 21 hits
> that are
> legitimate email clients. Not all of them are for free, and that's an
> imcomplete list. Looks like a pretty open market to me.

You're going back to the absolute number being a measure of
competition, and it's not.

> Versiontracker lists 9, some of which you can't get anymore.

It lists 18-20 by my count.

To go back to my point, which you've either deliberately or mistakenly
misinterpreted, having a free email client has--in the same way that
it did in the browser space--made it much more difficult to _sell_ a
client and thus reduced the competitive level of the email client
market.

David Silbey

History Alvernia College
silbeysilbey.net

On 8/31/08 2:49 PM, "David Silbey" <silbeysilbey.net> wrote:

>> Let's see...6+5 == 11, and I left a few out that are mosx only. Even
>> so,
>> that's almost twice the number of available email clients than were
>> on OS 9.
>> Yes. Yes, I do in fact call an almost 2x increase in the number of
>> email
>> clients a good deal more competition.
>
> I'm not sure where you're getting 11, so I'm going to stick with 6.5.
> That's not a substantial number more than in OS 9 and certainly not a
> "good deal more" competition.

That was off the top of my head. Actually looking on Versiontracker put that
number at 20-21.

>
>> Well, if you want to seriously look at overall market share, it's all
>> Outlook, case closed. Market share alone is the worst way to decide
>> if a
>> market is thriving, because dominant market share is not always
>> created by
>> chicanery.
>
> You're changing your measure. "Thriving" is not the same thing as
> "competitive." In addition, we're talking about Mac market share, not
> overall market share (why else compare OS X to the Classic Mac OS?),
> so Outlook's market share is irrelevant.

No, I'm pointing out that if all you care about is market share, then you
can't have competition unless the competition has some magical number of
market share which you have yet, by the way to define.

As well, if you want to talk about overall market share in the Mac market,
does classic even have a viable market share as the majority OS on hardware?
Even if you eliminate all Intel Macs, how many Mac users are even running
classic and email in Classic a majority of the time?

>
>> If you want to assume all dominance is because of unethical activity
>
> What on earth are you talking about? I've never even mentioned ethics
> as a measure. The conversation was whether a market was competitive
> or not.

When a Mac user brings up MS they rarely aren't talking about chicanery.

>
>> So spare me the "monopoly is bad" argument, it's an overly
>> simplistic view.
>
> You're again reacting to something I didn't say. You're conflating
> "competitive/non-competitive" with "good/bad." I'm not making the
> same connection.
>
> To return to my actual point, the raw number of applications in a
> market space is not necessarily a good reflection of how competitive
> that market is. Much more critical is how much market share each
> application has. A market dominated by one application is much less
> competitive than one that's not. That's why it's called (as you did
> yourself) a 'monopoly.' Whether that's bad or good depends largely on
> other factors.
>

You have yet to supply us with a magic number for what "competitive" market
share is. In addition, should you provide that number, please, do tell us
how you arrived at it with supporting data.

>>> It still has a clear majority market share. So since all you care
>>> about is
>>> market share, there's no real competition,
>
> I'm not sure whose position you're arguing with, but it isn't mine.
> This is not a all or nothing competitive/not competitive situation.
> Is the browser market as competitive as it could be? Given IE's
> continuing dominance, I wouldn't think so. Is it more competitive
> than when IE had 90%+ market share? Of course it is. Even having
> said that, of course, it's not competitive in the sense that companies
> can _sell_ their browsers. The paid browser market has essentially
> disappeared because of the free clients, just as it is the process of
> doing with the email market.

Again, you keep pushing some level of market share without a number to work
with so what else, exactly do I have to work with. Nothing. You keep saying
it's the market share of the competition, not how many companies are
competing in that market. Even worse, you treat "market" like there's one
monolithic definition.

For example, at the low end, there is a LOT of competition in the image
editing market. At the *high* end? Almost none. Photoshop's market dominance
changes *radically* depending on what market you're really talking about. So
you can't just say "email clients on the Mac" like it's a single thing. It's
not.

>
> Are you _really_ arguing that the browser market was just as
> competitive when IE had 90%+ as it is now? Really?

Define your market. In large enterprise internal networks, IE's market share
is far closer to 95%, so depending on your POV, there's still no competition
whatsoever, *if you use market share as your sole metric for competition*.
Again, what market are you talking about, competitive *how*.

>
>> A search for "email client" on version tracker brings in 21 hits
>> that are
>> legitimate email clients. Not all of them are for free, and that's an
>> imcomplete list. Looks like a pretty open market to me.
>
> You're going back to the absolute number being a measure of
> competition, and it's not.

It's a far better indicator than treating the entire email market on the mac
like it's a singular entity, and that marketshare is the sole metric,
especially when you won't provide a minimal number for a "competitive"
market share.

>
>> Versiontracker lists 9, some of which you can't get anymore.
>
> It lists 18-20 by my count.

"Email client" (sans quotes) in the Mac OS Classic section returns 17 hits.
Here's the URL:
<http://www.versiontracker.com/php/qs.php?mode=basic&action=search&str=email
+client&srchArea=macos%7Cclassic&submit=Go>

Of those hits, 7 are not email programs, but addons to browsers, antispam
apps, plugins, etc.

One of those is emailer lite, which is essentially a duplicate listing for
emailer.

That leaves 9 unique email clients, some of which are coming up on a decade
of being out of active development and support.

The Mac OS X version of the same search,
<http://www.versiontracker.com/php/qs.php?mode=basic&action=search&str=email
+client&srchArea=macosx&submit=Go>, brings up 34 hits, of which 10 are not
really email clients in the conventional usage of the word. So that's what,
24 email clients.

>
> To go back to my point, which you've either deliberately or mistakenly
> misinterpreted, having a free email client has--in the same way that
> it did in the browser space--made it much more difficult to _sell_ a
> client and thus reduced the competitive level of the email client
> market.

No, it obviously hasn't, since there are many email clients, most of them
free all vying for users. What it has done is made it harder to get people
to PAY for a client, because you have to give people an actual reason beyond
"We're <name>". But making it harder to SELL stuff and making the market
less competitive are in fact, two different things.

--
John C. Welch

Would it be rude of me to ask the the two or three people who seem to
insist on "debating" this issue please take it to private email?

[Not at all, and once again, I think more than enough has been said on this topic and its various spin-offs. So let's consider this one closed too. -Joe]

--

tom coradeschi
tcoraskylands.ibmwr.org