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 pro

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.