On 8/30/08 6:12 AM, "David Silbey" <silbey
silbey.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
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