Re: Thunderbird
I am an average computer user. I can't tell POP3 from thing-a-ma-jig. Thunderbird was so complicated to setup on a windows computer, that I could not make it work. The people at Mozilla back then were very much less than helpful. The old attitude of "I am so full of computer knowledge, that I refuse to help you" is part of the problem. By comparison, why could I set up hotmail, gmail, yahoo mail, or proton mail
without a hitch? Thunderbird refused to be helpful, and that's why they languish in the market. They act like a tax accountant who mocks clients for not knowing "depreciation, amortization & generally accepted
accounting principles". That's just not what you should do to build a client (I mean human client) relationship.
Apart from that, Mozilla could make money by building a system that gets rid of annoying paywalls, whereby numerous web publishing magazines (from Computing, Fishing, Cigar Aficionado, to Wall Street Journal, Herald, Washington Post, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, Stern, whatever) that would work by having people sign up for a plan that lets people read whatever they want for 5 cents, 5 pennies, per article, and to be workable, the system would let people build up e.g. $5 or Euro 5 worth of charges, before it it charges this to the customer's actual credit card. And, being automated, it could put each 5 penny item into the various buckets for each publication, and pay it out to them once that bucket hits e.g. $100, 100E, minus a $2 or so fee each time. That way, people won't get asked to subscribe to the whole magazine, when they just wanted to read ONE (1) ARTICLE. That way, a publication might get $12,500 or so, if 250,000 people read that particular article. Would they say no to that? And of course, any publication that gets too greedy and demands $1 per article won't get as many clicks as those who are happy with 5 pennies each.
That might work as a sort of "Internet Publishers Clearinghouse", with or without the offers to win
a million bucks, pounds, euros. At least, if I were CEO of Mozilla, this is something I would do.
To quote Mark Knopfler, it's "money for nothing, chicks for free". I think he meant actual chickens, in order to not be offensive.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
