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I don't know if we "failed spectacularly"; Mitch is a fun guy to work for but he didn't really know what he wanted to build, so when he decided it was time to pull the plug, off we went.

We certainly had lots of people who wanted to come in to work and write software, and didn't have a ton of ego wrapped up in which direction to march. We just weren't clear on which direction to march.




Sounds like you have way more knowledge than I do about what was happening, and what results they got. As best as I can say is that when you look at the people he pulled together, you’d expect the whole world to be on Chandler now, instead of Outlook and Google. Yet there was barely a production release, and it’s been abandoned for more than a decade.

I thank them for trying. But it seems like a great example of an “Apollo Team”.


Mitch was trying to do (at least) three things at once:

- make a hackable, open source tool

— create a new interaction model for PIM data

- be a livable Mail/Calendar client

The team assembled would probably have been quite competent at doing any one of those things!

It’s not clear to me there was a path to achieving a harmonious combination of all three given any staffing.




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