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I worry big companies like the failure of free email. They want you to stick in their giant corporate silo. Gmail to Gmail works. WhatsApp works. The death of t

I worry big companies like the failure of free email. They want you to stick in their giant corporate silo. Gmail to Gmail works. WhatsApp works. The death of the smaller participant by sheer impracticality suits them. Isp's are giving up on even providing SMTP servers. I'm beginning to think I will have to stop using my private domain name and just use a Gmail address. Then they will have won, locked me in and probably start charging me...

ken 7y ago
Indeed. The elephant in the room that this post missed is that email was created by researchers, not corporations. Today, a huge swath of computer science progress is created by corporations. We're making great strides in areas which can easily be monetized. Email really isn't one of those. Worse, there are a lot of almost-email areas which are (Slack, Facetime, etc), which makes it nearly impossible for non-commercial entities to produce a viable alternative. You're fighting network effects and deep pockets. There are a lot of areas of computing that we take for granted today which were only created because they didn't need a corporation to find a way to be profitable. When big companies get together and try to produce the OS of the future, we get Multics and Taligent and OS/360. When individuals scavenge old cheap hardware to play around with for their own personal use, we get Unix and Linux and the Apple II.
Animats 7y ago
I worry big companies like the failure of free email. Yes. It's a huge win for Google to read everyone's email. Also, companies like the idea of programs needing "security updates", which allows pushing other unwanted things as well. Microsoft was one of the first in that area. If they couldn't have pushed Windows 10 as a semi-forced update, it never would have sold. Now pushing unwanted features is so pervasive that Mozilla does it.

ken 7y ago

Indeed. The elephant in the room that this post missed is that email was created by researchers, not corporations. Today, a huge swath of computer science progress is created by corporations. We're making great strides in areas which can easily be monetized. Email really isn't one of those. Worse, there are a lot of almost-email areas which are (Slack, Facetime, etc), which makes it nearly impossible for non-commercial entities to produce a viable alternative. You're fighting network effects and deep pockets. There are a lot of areas of computing that we take for granted today which were only created because they didn't need a corporation to find a way to be profitable. When big companies get together and try to produce the OS of the future, we get Multics and Taligent and OS/360. When individuals scavenge old cheap hardware to play around with for their own personal use, we get Unix and Linux and the Apple II.

Animats 7y ago

I worry big companies like the failure of free email. Yes. It's a huge win for Google to read everyone's email. Also, companies like the idea of programs needing "security updates", which allows pushing other unwanted things as well. Microsoft was one of the first in that area. If they couldn't have pushed Windows 10 as a semi-forced update, it never would have sold. Now pushing unwanted features is so pervasive that Mozilla does it.