smime

I remember that day in December a couple of years ago when I traveled to Zürich to meet Raphael. He was then one of the main developers of Zoe, a revolutionary mail client that has died a slow death. Zoe was revolutionary on many levels: it was browser-based, built extensive around search, had some magic sauce that built an adressbook on its own and (then funky) had RSS integration. The User Interface was slick and nice (a little macish), all in all a wonderful little proof-of-concept that showed the great potential that Email would have, if done right.

Time warp to yesterday. FMail went through the news and Twitter, popping up on the same day as AOLs new Email (codenamed “Project Phoenix”, why is it that all those projects borrow from greek mythology, FMail ran as Project Titan), which looks very promising. Zoe had much of this already, but that was 2004.

It is both interesting and devastating to see, that great ideas such as the one that Raphael conceived and built take a long time to arrive and that with some simple thoughts on the future of certain ideas one could easily come up with breakthrough ideas, but that it always takes years and a dominant position in the market to really get those ideas to live and prosper. I’ll never forget that day and evening in Zürich, where the famous Mr. Langreiter joined us, though his hair wasn’t that grey back then.