Is Converging Towards the Desktop Good?
November 7th, 2006
An interesting point of view: Is Converging Towards the Desktop Good?
The last 2 years or so, I've been using GMail. And every now and then, I step back and think "shouldn't I go back to using a desktop client, so that I can read my mail on the train?" And every time, the answer is "no", for 2 reasons: one, I don't like my mail to be attached to one computer (I have 2 computers at home, and I don't want to climb 2 stairs because that one email was received on my top-floor computer while I'm sitting in the living room) And second and even more important, I really like the "conversations" idea that GMail has. I'm actually quite astonished that no desktop email client has cloned this idea yet. Everybody seems to be wanting to clone Outlook (while touting how bad Outlook is - where's the logic in that?)
On the other hand, you don't want to write some new Ajaxy widget for every functionality that you create - Ajax is hard to write as it is, and reusing other people's effort is 'nice', to say the least.
What do you think? Does reuse really hamper innovation? Or is innovation easier if you don't have to care about the nitty gritty details?
April 21st, 2008 at 10:19 PM >I don’t like my mail to be attached to one computer (I have 2 computers >at home, and I don’t want to climb 2 stairs because that one email was >received on my top-floor computer while I’m sitting in the living room) Thats why they invented IMAP. And about that converstations thingie , my mailclient already has an option for that , today I use Ctrl-T to get that. And even back in my pine days I already had support for that ... Heck even in my Fidonet days threading existed :)