OneBigWeb

One of the ideas that has fascinated me for a long time is the possibility of having a highly structured, unified Personal Content Store. So what is this beast? Let me explain.

Consider the two most common types of content that sits on your PC – the stuff that sits in your outlook folder and stuff that sits in your document folder. Now imagine you want to pull together all content involving a particular group of people over a particular period of time about a particular topic. Bizarrely, there is no efficient way for you to do this on the desktop today.

This is precisely the problem that a unified store is expected to solve. The theory is that if all apps share a generic data store, it will be easy to connect entities created in one app to those created by another. So the author of a spreadsheet can be the same entity as the author of a email. Remember that this is a generic concept – for example, you could navigate from events recorded in your calendar to the event’s associated expenses in your personal finance app!

Now, this idea has been around for years. But somehow, all attempts to build this thing have ended up as spectacular failures. Here are few.
1. Microsoft/WinFS. These folks have been at it the longest - Bill Gates himself had pushing for this over many years! WinFS, which was expected to be shipped along with Vista, was finally formally abandoned in June 2006.
2. PiCorp/Piworx. Another ambitious attempt spearheaded by Paul Maritz, who incidentally was a successful VP at Microsoft! After languishing for a couple of years, the company was recently acquired by EMC.
3. OSAF/Chandler. This was a open-source effort driven by Mitch Kapor, the guy who founded Lotus and created the Lotus 123 spreadsheet. Even after 6 years, the product has not had much of a dent. Its painful story was the subject of the book – Dreaming in Code

Even with all these supermen pushing for it, why have things not panned out? Why this jinx when it comes to building something that there is an obvious need for?

In the next post, I will try to answer just this question as well as why Google appears to be well positioned to finally break this jinx.