[Chris_Newton]

An interesting theme in UI this year has been what types of tools for remote collaboration have become popular as more people have been working from home. Several of the ones I’ve seen are indeed based on a sort of infinite canvas/desktop/whiteboard concept.

Apparently those businesses are doing OK providing that kind of SaaS, even though the things you can actually do on their boards might be much simpler than what full-power desktop software or more specialised SaaS can offer. And this does make sense: once you can put basic text and basic drawing in some sort of freeform layout and share that display with others remotely, you already have a useful collaboration tool.

Providing built-in support for more sophisticated visuals like tables or specific types of diagram might make things more efficient, as could making good use of shortcut icons, gestures, hotkeys and so on. However, these are incremental improvements. They might bring big improvements in productivity in some cases, but they’re still helping to solve the same fundamental problem in the same fundamental way.

So it seems that at least some developers are already experimenting with the concept you’re suggesting, if only in a relatively simple form so far.