When I saw the new Google "Inbox" tech where it's mining information from your email, it took about 10 seconds to realize it's nothing more than the personal email agents we created at cc:Mail way back in '91.
A little history lesson and it will all make sense.
FWIW, the cc:Mail team, bought by Lotus and killed over their Notes technology was the last time email innovation ever happened. Some stuff I had on the drawing board was back in the '90s never came to light.
Why? Microsoft bought cc:Mail's competitor, the #2 email producer, and gave it away for free. You can't get companies to invest in innovation of email when there's no money in the client technology.
Fast forward 20+ years and people are reinventing old wheels because there's money in the client thanks to advertising in the inbox.
Everybody loved Netscape mail, and guess what, most of the cc:Mail Windows team went to Netscape and rebuilt the same product for Netscape.
Then MS killed Netscape and the remnants are in Thunderbird, still using some of my designed from way back when.
For the record, cc:Mail was the first email product to launch external apps and provide filters so you could read any document whether you had the app or not.
This was before Adobe PDF or even mime types came about.
Guess where some of that came from?
Here's a fun fact, Adobe was next door to cc:Mail and I was in many of those original discussions for the tech that became PDF. Google now occupies Adobe's old space.
My credits to email include:
- Launching Apps
(doesn't sound like a big deal now, it was HUGE then and everyone copied it as soon as they saw it)
- Document filters for attached data for inline viewing before mime types even existed.
(we got all the filters from Lotus AmiPro)
- Find Dialog, where you look for email fields like FROM does/doesn't contain, etc. Before that people actually used SCRIPTS which meant only the IT guys could add filters.
Can you believe seemingly simple stuff like that was so non-obvious to all our competitors?
The c:Mail team also invented integrated forms, such as "a WHILE YOU WERE OUT". The concept was to use the mail client to fill in many forms like that, time sheets, expense reports, etc. which would be delivered to the person or software that needed that information. There was no browser at the time so we planned to use email as the universal form client. Not sure if anyone still does this but it was very cool.
Not trying to sound like I'm tooting my own horn but the point is, when I tell you all this new innovation isn't new, I do know what I'm talking about LOL
So now that the history lesson is over, let me explain where true innovation left off.
Store and forward technology
The best minds in email were, before Lotus and MS pretty much put the skids on new innovation, planning to use email like the USPS or UPS. Any package anything wanted to send would use the MTA (Mail Transport Agent) to deliver it from app to app directly. Basically, where they now use iCould, One Drive, and all this so-called new technology, email WAS going to be that technology back in '91 before we got stopped.
Our view of the future was the inbox, which was either downloaded or on the server, now 'the cloud', would basically become used like your drive. If we'd had our way, email would've become "DRIVE E:" and integrating apps over email would be as simple as opening any other file under the OS, not using some crazy APIs. Email itself, your traditional inbox, would've just been another application sharing content on the MTA.
The concept was solid, but thanks the team being more or less disbanded and MS giving it away and Lotus banking the fame on Notes, it never happened.
It could still happen as email delivery it still the USPS and UPS of the world, it's just needs a device driver written and VOILA! it's your cloud storage.
Funny thing is all sorts of software stores and forwards content all over the place but instead of using the tried and true MTA transport layer, everyone invents new stuff to do the same thing over and over.
Like I said, Google isn't innovating the Inbox, they're barely starting to do anything that we had planned over 20 years ago.
Ancient tech, wheels being reinvested, we should be way further along than we are but I certainly wasn't going to build it for free and thanks to MS, nobody would invest money in the tech about the early 90s so thank you big business for hobbling advancements yet again.
I'd almost love to get back into the saddle and take another run at it but I had my run at it and they stopped us before the true potential was realized.
