theWHIR Blogs - Leah Kubik & Jason Brown's Email hosting Blog

Bring on "The Hacking Business model"

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:32:35 -0400

By Jason Brown So I read early this morning that Oracle has bought out Sun. Yadda yadda, one more large company buys out another large company.... However in this case it brings a few more complciations to the table. Sun who bought out MySQL (arguably the most popular open source database server) a while back is now owned by maybe the largest commercial database entity around. What does this mean for MySQL? This is a common question I read while trolling for more information today. Why is nobody asking what is going to happen to Oracle? "Does this mean the fall of the giant?" <- I'm not hearing this question anywhere. Now I don't feel just because a company or product is on top in the commercial world, it should auto-magically fall to the best rival in the open source world. Far from it. Good software is difficult to produce and harder to sell and distribute in this market economy and I think anyone who can create something from a few lines of code and stick with as it grows and becomes the greatest thing should be rewarded for their efforts. But what does this mean when one company now "owns" two very similar products at what I see as very opposite ends of the spectrum? Well I think Michael Widenius sums it up rather well on his blog (as he should, being the fonder and original developer for MySQL):

Exchange 2010 on the way

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:00:10 -0400

By Jason Brown So while I'm admittedly not a fan of Microsoft Exchange for an email platform, I am curious to see what the monolith has up it's sleeve. Given the state of the global economy, the well the email software vendors draws from is getting lower and lower. Businesses large and small are looking to tighten purse strings and thus are really evaluating exactly what functions and features they need when it comes to messaging. The combination of other vendors coming out with a feature set that is closer to what the average user needs and folks moving to hosted solutions makes the well even harder to find (regardless of how much or little water is in it). The standard box of 64 colors isn't as appealing when 16 or 32 may do just fine (or when the box of 128 is just around the corner).

SocialEmailNetworkThingy

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:41:19 -0400

By Jason Brown Over the course of the last few years, I've seen a definite decline in email use within the network of friends and collegues I interact with daily. We wait to chat on IM or Skype! or we send a brief message on Linkedin. I was checking out a report from Nielsen Research and it said one out of every online 11 minutes is spent social networking and blogging sites!!!! With these "Communities" growing almost twice as fast as the other leading online channels (search, portals, email), it really brings into question where we will be in the next 5 years. The Report continues: Social networks/ blogs now 4th most popular online category - ahead of personal email

Death of the snail?

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:09:45 -0500

By Jason Brown So I read a while back that the US government is thinking of dropping mail delivery to 5 days a week instead of 6. Now to me, this sounds like a fantastic idear. Faced with dwindling mail volume and rising costs, the post office was $2.8 billion in the red last year. "If current trends continue, we could experience a net loss of $6 billion or more this fiscal year," Potter said in testimony for a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee.

Where did all the free email go???

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:23:14 -0500

By Jason Brown OK, so it really has not come to that point yet, but will it? I read last week that Lycos Europe was dropping their free email offering completely. Here is a copy of the letter Lycos sent to their users (as posted here): Dear User,

Maybe a few things to consider

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 14:31:44 -0500

By Jason Brown Ah, the holidays..... I receive more email this time of year than any other I think. Loads from friends and family that are going to be visiting "home" around the holiday, wanting to connect, see how things are. I'm always reminded of Seth Godin's "Email checklist" and I thought I'd share it here: 1. Since it's going to a group, have I thought about who is on my list?

Starting from scratch....

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 11:27:00 -0400

By Jason Brown You're looking to start hosting a website. This could be for yourself, you family, friends or as a full on business. With all the choices out there, where to begin can be a bit daunting (even more than a bit). Not too long ago, I was faced with this very thing. I had been hosting my own website at home for a while and a collegue was in need of the same. I was able to make a deal with a local data center, picked up a 1U server and started the madness that has ensued since. The rest of this is going to be directed towards setting up a web/email hosting system as a business, for the sake of making money. Not all of the software is going to be free. I'll touch on setting up a totally free version in the next post. I knew I wanted to go with a Linux OS and that was about it. I started with Fedora, then tried OpenSuse (then shortly tried SLES), followed by Debian and then OpenBSD (not a flavour of linux, but i tried it anyhow). Why no Windows server? Well, for me it is simple, I want to be able to dig deeper than Windows will allow me to do should the need arise. I did finally decide on an OS and the rest of the pieces. They are:

eggs and baskets

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 15:26:00 -0400

By Jason Brown So I've been dedicating a good bit of my time lately brainstorming a new product. This has made me think about how I go about providing hosting to the very small number of people I do (some friends and family that need a business presence on the web and that is about it). I loathe the idear of finding a one stop shop for all my offering needs as it were. It is my opinion that the companies that have the resources to provide every possible tool and utility one may want to offer to their customers also have the resources to box those same people in. By box in I mean that you don't get the source to the products you are running and you have no idea where to go if you have issues execpt through their tech support. This may be good, it may be aweful and that almost assuredly will depend on the mood of the support person you speak with as well as your mood (don't ever forget how much your mindset and what you project going into a tech support call will effect the outcome of the call). Many shun open source products because they don't come with some level of tech support. For a number of organizations this is just, they don't have the resources to bring on a full time admin or to dedicate a full time admin to one particluar task. It may make sense to put the burden of support somewhere else. This area is so grey, really. There are so many software vendors out there who provide only one product. This may be email, this may be web services, this may be anti spam or anti virus protection, but in my opinion, these individual vendors are who we need to be looking to to provide a bundled product to our customers. This takes careful consideration and the decision should not be made over night. If you really need something right away, at least make sure you aren't getting locked into something you can't get out of if you change your mind in a month (or even a week). Then spend some time as you can and really dig into a few things that are options and re-evaluate your decision. There is nothing wrong with changing your mind and your customers will understand (especially if your decision provides them with a better product).

FREE AS IN BEER?????

Wed, 28 May 2008 02:58:00 -0400

By Jason Brown So the software company I devote most of my time to has just released an open source version of it's commercial offering. This has maybe opened up the most ginormous can of internal battle worms for me in a loooooooooooong time. It has really made me think of what made me get into this industry in the first place. So what is "free as in beer"? I hear this thrown around a good deal (more in the last couple of months internally). Fron the context, I think most of us can grasp what this is about, but as I've been hearing this in mixed context lately I thought I would dig in a bit further . It seems it's roots are from the first bit of an essay by Richard Stallman. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.

The way of the DB Dodo

Mon, 05 May 2008 03:30:00 -0400

By Jason Brown ****EDIT i want to thank Mark below for pointing out something that often gets overlooked. I should have dug a bit deeper before I started with this post. I do believe I was objectionalbe and was giving my opinion about how and where things may go, but I could hvae been more cautious. Please read his comments if you read this post.