Lots of people ask me, probably because I have internet chat programs open a
lot but also possibly because it's my god damned job to know,
"What's going on with Divmod?"
Specifically, an area of concern lately has been that no visible
improvements have been made to our flagship
product in quite some time.
As anybody who reads JP's blog or Amir's ought to
know,
we have been hard at work.
We have launched a new application. We have started a few new projects. It may seem as though
we've randomly gone off in a new direction.
We don't have much of a budget for customer relations, so we have been late
in explaining what's going on, but rest assured that there is a plan at work
here, and that your email is safe. We are trying to find incremental ways to
become profitable without requiring open signup to Quotient (the Divmod intelligent
email system), because it is too hard to achieve that goal while we are
still working on short schedules and trying to figure out how the company is
going to keep running from month to month. With no revenue stream, we don't
have the collective attention span required to finish such an ambitious
project, despite the massive effort invested so far.
However, we do have plans for applications in the following months which are
effectively small, vertical slices of the full Quotient experience, and we
will be turning them on one at a time, offering free or low-cost sign-up to
each individually, and finally (when some of these have started paying for
themselves) we will roll them up into a larger service, and migrate all our
existing users' data.
Truly adventurous users may want to move over sooner than that, the
second we have anything email-related at all. Talk to me, and I'll be sure
to let you know when that moment is.
We have just rewritten most of our infrastructure outside of Twisted.
Although it is going to take time, and some intermediary steps to get our
whole email application running on top of the new stuff, it is
definitely going to be worth the wait. The application is going to
get better by an order of magnitude. (Those of you who have layperson family
members who subscribe - please translate that appropriately.)
Personally, I'm immensely relieved by this change of pace. We have brought
on a new employee, Moe Aboulkheir, who is absolutely brilliant. On a team
with too many infrastructure gurus, he (along with Amir) has been the
persistent voice of the application, getting us from an idea to something
resembling a finished product faster than ever before in our history. It
looks like we're going to be replicating that success a few times in the
near future and I can't wait.
Divmod is OK. It's just a flesh wound, really.
We've had worse. Thanks to all you out there reading this for sticking with
us.