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

Great memory r634718! Let me add a few
tidbits to your memory lane.

First, yes, the in those days free offered MS Outlook killed Ecco
but on top of that Microsoft saw something valuable in what the
wanted from Zvi. NetManage had in those days a patent on some for
the Internet important TCP/IP stack coding which MS bought and
during that deal in 1997 Zvi took Ecco of the market. In my
humbled opinion as part of the deal requested by MS.

After 1997 NetManage continued to provide the free download of the
last EccoPro version on their FTP site. In 1999 the
owner/moderator Tom Hoots at the EccoPro forum at Compuserve
established a new tech support group at Yahoo under the name
"eccopro". At that time the Yahoo user group "eccopro" and
NetManage’s reseller CompuSol had the official original EccoPro
download available per FTP link to NetManage.

In August of 2002, after several interruptions of their FTP
download link, NetManage allowed CompuSol to distribute a free
zipped version of the last original installation dated 8/27/1997.
This version is still available at http://www.compusol.org/ecco/401e32.zip .
Related to network installations with co-workers, CompuSol
contacted NetManage in 2004 to get a clarification to the license
agreement part of the 16-bit installer, see also http://www.compusol.org/ecco/netmanage.html .

Yes it was painful when NM offered to release Ecco to open source
in the summer of 2005, and kept stalling and stalling with nothing
to show for. We were all following the direct discussions with
NetManage's Archie Roboostoff, NM's general counsel Steve Mitchell
and Jeff Sonnabend representing the Ecco user group and several
programmers who had offered to work on the open source project.
The third party code you mentioned which hindered the open source
release, the database kernel, was licensed by Borland. For me it
was no surprise that after NetManage was sold to Micro Focus in
Great Britain, Borland after buying Micro Focus hired Archie
Roboostoff as part of the deal (see https://www.linkedin.com/in/archiedr ).

Friedhelm

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On 9/3/2015 9:10 PM, r634718-/[email protected] [eccopro] wrote:

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.

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Posted by: Friedhelm Dohmann <[email protected]>
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