Email is currently our digital home.

· Bits and Bobs 4/21/25
  • Email is currently our digital home.
    • It's on someone else's turf: the email service provider.
    • But you can only read or send.
    • You can't have interactive stateful UIs for emails.
    • The UI for an email is whatever the sender chose to say at the time of sending.
      • It's likely the same thing they sent to a whole audience, not just you.
    • What if each email and task could have the UI you wanted?
    • If a traditional email client were to make specialized UIs for specific classes of tasks, they'd miss most kinds of tasks.
      • Tasks that don't have an audience of, say, 10M users aren't worth the email client company assigning a PM and a handful of engineers to build.
      • They're below the Coasian Floor.
    • The interfaces we use today are limited by the imagination of some PM working at the company that built the app.[pj]
    • Imagine a system isn't even limited by your imagination but by the imagination of everyone using the system.[pk]

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