Yep, totally agree with you there.
After reading the article that was my first thought when he mentioned adding support for Google IMAP.
Full stop. Don't do it. You have a product that is doing well as the solution for something with a clear business case that's not well addressed elsewhere. Own that market and focus your development attention on that Exchange ecosystem.
As soon as you branch to IMAP/Gmail/General purpose you're going to be in the sea of tons of other email clients, most of which are free. It's going to dilute the value proposition for Hiri because Hiri is going to become "another email client" that also supports exchange. The taste for email clients that add exchange support is not generally a good experience. It also means that you have to ensure all of your UI elements work equally with both, bringing you to more of a lowest-common-denominator experience.
When I see Linux Exchange Email Client and that's all you do, I see specialty software that I can rely on to solve that problem correctly. When I worked at a company that used Exchange, I would have bought it IMMEDIATELY and convinced my boss to reimburse me later.
As soon as you become a general purpose email client, everything about what you offer to solve that problem starts getting lost in the shuffle.
After reading the article that was my first thought when he mentioned adding support for Google IMAP.
Full stop. Don't do it. You have a product that is doing well as the solution for something with a clear business case that's not well addressed elsewhere. Own that market and focus your development attention on that Exchange ecosystem.
As soon as you branch to IMAP/Gmail/General purpose you're going to be in the sea of tons of other email clients, most of which are free. It's going to dilute the value proposition for Hiri because Hiri is going to become "another email client" that also supports exchange. The taste for email clients that add exchange support is not generally a good experience. It also means that you have to ensure all of your UI elements work equally with both, bringing you to more of a lowest-common-denominator experience.
When I see Linux Exchange Email Client and that's all you do, I see specialty software that I can rely on to solve that problem correctly. When I worked at a company that used Exchange, I would have bought it IMMEDIATELY and convinced my boss to reimburse me later.
As soon as you become a general purpose email client, everything about what you offer to solve that problem starts getting lost in the shuffle.