(2003-07-22) Ray Ozzie Email Rss Hydra Wiki

Ray Ozzie's interested in (a) RSS views of EMail, and (b) integration of Hydra (-like apps) and Wiki.

Some other people are interested in viewing personal Calendar events and Tasks in their RSS feed, authored in some other environment (like TinderBox) they already have open all the time. At first, this sounded stupid to me ("next, let's build a monthly view of that RSS Category..."), but then I decided there are 2 forces at work here: (a) people want a single "place"/app to work in (reading and writing), and (b) they're willing to sacrifice features to have that integration (and customization?). Rather than a Universal Canvas they're looking for a Universal Toolbox (including a Universal Inbox). A couple questions come to mind:

• will they continue to be willing to give up features (the old "integrated office apps" like Lotus Symphony were passed over for less-integrated individual apps (the MsOffice pieces, back before they got all bundled together).

• while this starts out as stuff than can be taped together from pieces, as more features get desired it becomes necessary for that "core" application to get pretty rich. At some point will some Open Standards not matter as much? Probably not, since so many of these features involve communicating with other users' apps.