Re: News about Zvi Alon, Ex CEO and Chairman of Netmanage

Ha!  So that's what Zvi is up to these days...

I never liked the guy after he scuttled Ecco... particularly after NM strung us along for literally years saying it was going to release Ecco to open source and kept stalling and stalling with no explanations. I remember when they finally said they were going to do it, and it actually came down to the very day it was supposed to happen... and then they said it wasn't going to happen.  MAN that was aggravating!  It turned out there was some third party code in there that they didn't want to release for whatever legal reasons and that was that.  All that time wasted for nothing.  It wasn't the fact that they didn't release it that ticked me off, it was the way they strung us along and kept us in the dark about it.  So instead, they just deep sixed Ecco and prevented development for years.  They shouldn't have said they were going to do it and then screw us like that.  They should have simply said they can't, even if they couldn't explain why and not kept us waiting for nothing.

In the end though, at least they released the binary for the community.  I am thankful for that.  I don't know how much Zvi himself had to do with all of that, but I have to assume he called the shots.

For those who don't know, MS Outlook killed Ecco.  When MS bundled Outlook with MS Office in 1997, Netmanage (the company that then developed it) apparently made the decision that it would not try to compete with Outlook and stopped Ecco development.  That same year, just before development stopped PC Magazine gave Ecco rave reviews and said it was the best PIM on the market.  Zvi Alon was the CEO of Netmanage.  To this day I cannot understand that decision.  Outlook and Ecco are apples and oranges.  But that's what happened.  So Ecco is 18 years out of development now.  That is pretty much forever in computer years.  And it STILL has an active following.