“It’s been devastating to innovation”

While listening to John Gruber & Dan Benjamin’s – The Talk Show #24, I was reminded about one of my pet peeves with all the free software – it completely kills the innovation¹.

John and Dan were talking about email.

I feel the same way about email clients as I do about feed readers – they’re water.

And by water, I mean money.

By money, I mean: my wallet is open for something better than Mail.app.

Elsewhere:

“Email is built on a set of standards, and is implemented by a number of different servers, clients, etc. All this makes innovation in the email space move at a glacial pace.” – Jason @ Babelnote

1. I’m calling web browsers the exception that proves the rule. For some reason, there are plenty of desktop options for web browsers, each fairly distinct and interesting from the other. Throughout the day, I regularly alternate between Safari and Camino while usually touching Internet Explorer and Firefox every other day.