What’s Google’s motive for providing free email? Is it that they just want people to be able to communicate easily with one another, or is it that a major advertising conglomerate with a twelve-figure annual revenue stands to benefit tremendously by consuming and using all of your inbound and outbound communication? In comparison, Fastmail is a com... See more
The fascinating thing about identity is that it’s kind of a stack of its own. When you sign up to a new app or service, you almost always use an existing identity. Until recently, that identity was typically your email address or phone number. Both email and phone numbers are great base layers for online identity because they are (sort of open) sta... See more
While email's continued evolution is significant, what it has retained from the old web sets it apart from the other pretty, convenient apps. Email is an open, interoperable protocol. Someone can use Google's service, spin up a server of her own, or send messages through Microsoft's enterprise software. And yet all of these people can communicate s... See more
Email is actually a tremendous, decentralized, open platform on which new, innovative things can and have been built. In that way, email represents a different model from the closed ecosystems we see proliferating across our computers and devices.
Email apps are good at being better. They've invented or popularized some of the most innovative ideas in software—even if they can’t always find a business model to match. And those features are what live on.
In 1985, a gigabyte of hard drive memory cost around $75,000. By 1995, it was around $750. Come 2004 — the year Gmail began — it was a few dollars. Today, it’s less than a penny. Now Gmail offers 15 gigabytes free. What a marvel. What a mess.