dpower

Hi there - I'm the author of the post in question. I chose my language carefully. I do think FLOSS only is a fundamentalist position. The word is used to describe a religious believer who interprets scripture literally. I did mean to bring the baggage, but to provoke thought rather than to insult. And I must stress, this only applies to those who believe in FLOSS ONLY, completely turning their back on proprietary software. It's my opinion that this is not a rational position. Proprietary software can complement FLOSS. This is for the people who write to me and say "Not open source? Forget about it!".

Personally, I am a fan of FLOSS. What's not to like? But sometimes private companies compelled to compete in a free market produce better software. Seems to be especially true of consumer facing software. Think Gimp vs. Photoshop or Sketch.

Also, I don't think this is true anymore: "most got attracted to the platform for the advantages of its open and freely usable code". It used to be true, but I think Linux has wider appeal now. And I think that's a good thing.

Hi there, I'm the author of the blog post. Some context you may find interesting, and maybe I should do a follow up post about this.

We were very enterprise focused, but it just didn't work. We were trying to displace MS Outlook. And unfortunately, most people want to stick with Outlook. Not because it's better, but because it's what they know. We found that even if we convinced 8 out of 10 people in a company to buy Hiri, it wasn't enough. IT departments don't want to support more than one email client. 100% adoption is simply not an option.

So we pivoted to the current model. A bottom up strategy that has made the company viable. I would say about 50% of our customers are paying with the department credit card, and the other 50% buy it using their personal card.

Another interesting find - the growth stage of any given company has a role to play too. Younger companies (both the age of the company and the age of the staff) seem to be more open to trying new software. I guess they don't bring any legacy issues to the table. The problem is that a lot of these young companies choose Gmail. This is why we have chosen to support Gmail.

Thanks for posting this b01t. I'm co-founder of Hiri. Saw a little traffic dripping in from HN so thought I'd chime in. A few things you should know about Hiri: 1) Hiri is a replacement for MS Outlook. It's Exchange/Office 365 and Outlook.com only for now. 2) What's unique? It helps you get better at email. For example, you shouldn't check your email too often. So we don't do notifications. Instead we encourage you to wait 30 mins before checking mail. Loads of features like that. 3) You can drag emails into a fully featured task list. 4) We've got a fully functional calendar built in. 5) Linux, Mac and Windows.

Would love to hear what you guys think.

Hi Stumpyfr,

Thanks for the reply. Just trying to get an idea of how many startups are using Office 365.