As my friend Simon Wex mentions in his latest post, I think there are interesting avenues that a desktop client can explore, an exploration which is harder to do in a web context. Simon being Simon, he even wrote some draft code to see if one idea we batted around (having an email client detect questions in email) idea held water.

Note that Simon says that there are features which he thinks server-side solutions wouldn’t reasonably be able to scale up to. I don’t think performance scaling is the issue, although it’s true that desktop and server side solutions scale differently. Being able to scale the pool of innovators is much more important, in my mind, than being able to scale a particular feature. And that’s where open source, and per-desktop experimentation levers like Thunderbird add-ons, become really interesting.

Finally, I suspect that it might feel somehow better to Simon to have analyses like “which questions from my girlfriend have I not answered yet?” computed locally, as opposed to by some sort of computer in the sky who compares all such questions, auto-suggest answers based on answers Simon gave to his previous girlfriend, or answers the current girlfriend got from her last boyfriend, or even just the most popular answer to said question…