[bitwize]

Zawinski's Law: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

Back in the day, we had these things called email clients. A good example was Eudora from Qualcomm (yes, the Snapdragon company). It was simple, straightforward, and handled sending, receiving, and managing emails with aplomb -- and nothing else.

Then Microsoft came along and combined email, contacts, and calendaring in one application -- Outlook. And ate the lunch of all the non-web-based email clients out there. To this day Outlook is pretty much table stakes for working in a corporate environment, especially since all corporate IT has to do is deploy Exchange to handle all three tasks from the server side. And Eudora is literally a museum piece; the software's source was made available as a historic artifact and the trademark rights were transferred to the Computer History Museum.

"Simplicity" in software is a red herring. You need to read your market and find out what your customers actually want, what will make life easier and more convenient for your actual users. Sometimes people actually want the car that grills hamburgers, the cellphone with a built-in camera, the email client that also does contacts and calendaring.

[dimal]

> To this day Outlook is pretty much table stakes for working in a corporate environment

Then Superhuman made a tool to simply deal with email quickly and easily (using vim key bindings no less) and charges $30 a month for it. There’s still a market for simplicity if you look for it.

[lovethevoid]

How is that a market for simplicity when it’s a tool built on top of and for gmail+outlook that also combines AI for additional email management (with dev-specific additions like vim)?

[dimal]

It’s the interface. Compared to Outlook, it’s dead simple. It abstracts gmail/outlook away, and doesn’t give you ALL the features of Outlook. It just gives you what you really need. And it’s not dev-specific, they’ve just somehow taught all their users to use vim-style hotkeys to process email faster. I do see a trend of the. adding non-essentials now that they’re successful, but so far the AI additions are minor and haven’t gotten in the way, for me at least.

[lovethevoid]

Superficial simplicity I suppose.