In my previous posting on Netmail I talked about the product being washed up and dumped by Novell. It seems a few people have taken exception to my comments.

I'm standing by my statements. Netmail, by the time it was handed off to The Messaging Architects (TMA), had become a hollow abandoned product by Novell. Like I said in my previous post, at one point it had backing from a VP at Novell but not many other people. The product did not receive significant funding for development or marketing. And it was given away as Open Source Code called Hula. You don't give something away if there is still value to be gained.

I'm quoted from February of 2006

GWAVA Vice President of Marketing Richard Bliss: "Hula crosses the threshold between traditional collaboration products and the new emerging market of 'social software.' NetMail is a proven solution for millions of users. Hula lifts Novell's collaboration efforts into a leadership role in the open source community."

http://www.linuxelectrons.com/news/application/novell-donates-200-000-lines-source-code-netmail

I still stand by that statement as well. Netmail was a proven solution for millions of users but then Novell abandoned it. They had abandoned it before the Hula announcement, but many of us, myself included, still held out hope that Novell would realize the opportunity they had and exploit it. Novell at the time had to simplify their message around messaging. Placing Netmail in the Open Source community did establish themselves in a leadership role, only problem was, no one followed. Hula didn't go anywhere.

Netmail was a great product that was used and trusted by organizations that needed reliability and low cost. Mostly Universities, although it was popular with Airlines as well, being used for email for their deskless workers, like pilots and flight attendants.

But, a product can't become stagnant and stay great. Now, the players in this space are companies like Zimbra, Scalix, Mirapoint, Postmail, and others who have invested years of marketing and development around getting the product right. Netmail languished.

Now, kudos to TMA for attempting to revive the product and bring it back from the dead. And I still believe it is dead. But most organizations that I talk to are still looking for the same thing since they purchased the product, cheap and cheap. Netmail was used and liked because it didn't require significant hardware, nor costly maintenance, nor significant staff to maintain a large installation of tens of thousands of users.

Like my other post about GMail. There are new solutions on the market today that are even cheaper to own that are now competing in Netmail's primary space, the Education market. Netmail has been abandoned by Novell and will continue to lose its market even with the efforts of TMA. Novell had a luxury that TMA doesn't. Novell never had to make any money on Netmail. It wasn't a profit center of any kind, it was merely a pet project of some influencial people at Novell, and when they left, the life of Netmail left with them.