Is email slowly becoming obselete?

I think this might herald the beginning of the end. The CEO of Mozilla corporation declared that it was time for Thunderbird, their free desktop mail client, and one of the best out there, to find its own way, so that Mozilla could increase its focus on Firefox and “the open web”.

The venerable communications tool known as “e-mail”, the Internet’s original “Killer App”, is broken, and probably needs to die. At the very least, it needs to evolve, and it might be *too hard* to evolve it, we might be better off coming up with a replacement and a migration strategy. Actually, I think I might even have the beginnings of such in my head from a brainstorm the other night, but it’s competing with a few other things to get out of there right now. Oh and by “evolve” I certainly do not mean this.

Hence, a prediction: Within 5-10 years what you and I know today as “e-mail” will be where usenet is today – a communications platform still loved by a few aficionados, still distributed by many ISPs, but mostly supplanted by web based systems with richer interactive possibilities and fewer opportunities for spammers to gum up the works.

I met a few Mozilla Folk while at Kiwi Foo camp. It struck me that they were all very much Alphageeks, wicked smart, and on top of their game. The Kiwis were Roc, giving talks on the future of the Firefox layout manager and reinventing the debugger as a side project, and Ben, who has mostly moved onto new projects with his new employer, and I particularly liked Asa, who thinks and talks about Mozilla and the Open Web at a meta-level far above the average technical evangelist.

On the other hand, I might just be flattering myself by saying that the MozCorp people are brilliant, because they usually seem to think the same way I do about stuff, most notably about the increasing importance of the web as a platform and the role of Firefox in evolving that ecosystem and keeping it open.

More thoughts on this later…but here are a few links:

From Web Worker daily, who disagrees with me.

From a Seamonkey developer, pondering that this is the second time Mozilla Corporation has attempted to reduce the importance of email.

And thoughts from one of the two key developers of Thunderbird.

And finally a quote from Tim O’Rielly: “Are we moving into a world where Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are just device drivers for Firefox?”