Evolution for Windows
January 17, 2005 1 Comment
Nat Friedman announced that Novell has hired Tor Lillqvist to port Evolution to Windows. Tor was the one who previously ported GIMP to Windows. This is an interesting move and should help Evolution compete with Outlook much better. Also, if you have someone running Firefox, Evolution and OpenOffice.org on Windows then moving them to Linux becomes much easier.
–jeremy
Jeremy's Blog 
The addition of Evolution should give users on the Windows platform a more complete alternative office solution. Even if those users do not want to move off the Windows platform (or cant move off it). A business (whatever its size) must have a complete office solution since mixing and matching simply does not work that well because of various compatibility issues or other hassles of non-interoperability.
Without a complete solution most people will just stay locked in with MS Office because at the end of the day work has to get done and that can be done very well using Microsoft. Thunderbird has been the closest alternative that Ive found that can replace Outlook. As time passes these tools become more mature and become a no-brainer to install and use and well see users gravitate to them. But to replace the office desktop there must be a complete office solution where all components work together seamlessly.
So the idea of porting Evolution to Windows just to move users to Linux is just plain dumb. Just make a good set of Windows tools and people will use them. Eventually as people become more comfortable with non Microsoft solutions moving people from a Windows platform to a Linux platform becomes transparent. Does it really matter that I use Evolution on Linux or Windows? Yeah, Linux is a much better experience (IMHO) and I love Suns JDS but I myself make a living programming .NET on the Windows platform. Yeah I would love to do Java or Python on a Linux box but at the moment my bread and butter comes from Windows so just give me some more great Linux ports. Give people the tools and a reason to migrate and it will happen if the opportunity presents itself. The reason I think is there now we just have to up with solutions (complete tools packages).