Eudora! No, not Eudora! 'Built in' email within browsers is irrelevant. Eudora is only a click away. The same number of clicks as the Browser/Operating System email. You still have to click on 'mail' in the Browser, which gets you an ugly looking thing, without the luxurious features of Eudora Pro which will have a unit cost of zero when there are 1 billion people using it in Son of pdQ, but the advertising potency of a Webloom.
Eudora, like Yahoo! Amazon and those other weird things needs to be valued differently from Assets + Sulphuric Acid in Store + Net Profit After Tax = Market Capitalization.
This is a market of the mind with NO costs. This is the world of the Web. No chips even. Just mindshare. This is what people are at their best. Sure, we are still mostly monkey [check hairy arms and prehensile hands to confirm] but we are on the road to something better; much, Much, MUCH, MUCHHHH, launch, Launch, LAUNCH, LAUNCHHHHH!!!!! better.
Certainly there are going to be a lot of busted companies in the WebWorld which turn out to have been barking up the wrong tree. Maybe monsters like Yahoo! will fail as some new paradigm like Eudora comes along in a Son of pdQ with diffuse Weblinks leaving Yahoo! and Microsoft's BIG software with OS/Browser/Office2001/Email/Banking/Uncle Tom Cobbly and all built into a ponderous great monster when all somebody really wanted to do was say "Hi!"
Unit costs are zilch in the Web with the numbers
Mindshare is all
Peripheral processing is the way to go [not BGW = Bloody Great
Webservers in some 2001 Space Odyssey central computer concept]
Advertising by page views is what Eudora does
Human Reynolds Numbers mean people fractalize into many things other than Microsoft OSMonster. Forget the Pyramid Paradigm. Look at Linux.
Eudora is a natural fit with WWeb by Q!
The Eudora staff are there - some of them anyway.
The telecom software, hardware, chip, legal and all that stuff are in Q! now.
Don't give away the crown jewels. Sure, almost nobody has heard of Eudora despite the millions and millions of users out there. Okay, Eudora Pro sales are slow. Too bad. Eudora won't be self-funding. Advertizing departments aren't self-funding. Is the Public Relations department self-funding? Do newspapers pay them enough for the press releases to keep the public relations department in business?
Okay, maybe there is too much money gushing out and there is no way forward, but I haven't seen anything to demonstrate that. All I see is concern about the lack of sales of Eudora Pro as though Eudora should simply be a profit centre. Which would be nice. But let's think VERY, VERY carefully before ditching Eudora!
A stadium is a nice 3D object, an asset, all concrete and crowds which we can see on TV [if we watched such stuff]. Q! put a lot of millions into that. From what I've seen, I'd say it was worthwhile. The advertizing people count seconds of 'TV appearance of the QUALCOMM signs'. Number of times the word 'QUALCOMM stadium' is mentioned. Do the same for Eudora and QUALCOMM. Attach advertising Weblinks to Eudora [good quality ones].
That was then! This is now! [as they say in El Segundo - okay, maybe it's the Fugees]. Concrete, sulphuric acid, gold, oil and steel with balance sheets totted up to the cent just don't do it now. Even GaAs chips, LCDs, batteries [including tallow ester/methanol/fertilizer types], DSPs, flash memory, and ownership of spectrum don't totally do it for me. They are still in the realm of macro materialism.
Please be careful with Eudora!
It might be a powerful launching pad into the 21st century. Maybe making Yahoo! look trivial.
This time last year, people panicked over Korea because some silly Japanese banks had funded towers of concrete and steel which it turned out nobody wanted so the financial panic set in. I thought cellphone sales would suffer little because Koreans would cancel their overseas trips [which 80% of them did from Australian and NZ tourism figures], stay home, buy a cellphone and get back to work. So they did. Now in regard to Brazil, this new paradigm is accepted and cellphone sales are seen as immune to sulphuric acid, oil and concrete disruptions.
When Thailand toppled, people in the USA initially ignored the ants of Asia, thinking it another world. When the contagion spread and Japan, Russia and Brazil were looking dodgy too, then the USA panicked, precipitated by that Globalstar Buttefly in Russia failing to take off, thereby calling in the Long Term Capital Management Black-Holes theory for a beating. Alan Green$pan stepped up to the platter and hit a series of better home runs than what's his name Sousa or McGiver demonstrating the New Paradigm of money, the Web and mindshare in action. Thanks to Green$pan, nothing really happened - just some Big Dipper Fun with financial Web panics and change of ownership documentation.
Here we are in 1999 rock and rolling.
Eudora can be part of that New Paradigm. Here's a good trick. How about attaching encrypted US$1 to an email in a QUALCOMM email bank where people could all have an account. That should keep the Eudora people busy and you'd really see some action. There's more they could do too.
Okay, so Hotmail and pals have got some market share. Drop the "Eudoramail.com" big long name and go with "Qmail.com" or "Qcash.com"
People could use their own name - try signing on as John Smith or even Zigbnewski Eckleheimer in Hotmail. There are dozens of them already there. With the Web, it will be easy to find people - search engines will be able to trawl the email zones like Hotmail and Qmail if you type in somebody's name. Then push "SEND" on your IP Son of pdQ and you'll be in touch.
Stuff like that...
Mqurice |
