They are ubiquitous, household standards in tech, mostly held by incumbents, and barely changed in over a decade (which in internet age, it’s dog years).

@patio11’s tweet about how Hey And Superhuman contrasts with Gmail (which haven’t changed much over 15 years), set off an interesting discussion. The thread is a goldmine for product opportunities! 

In typical innovator’s dilemma, common tech standards like email and spreadsheets had not seen much innovation lately. It works yes, but because it works for the incumbents’ profit bottomline, the tech had not seen much love. What other products suffer this same fate? 

? Spreadsheets ala Excel - a Microsoft oldie, but other than putting the spreadsheet online in the likes of Google Sheets, not much had changed. But Airtable is promising.

? Web browsers - Chrome is becoming another bloated behemoth like how IE was. The new ones like Brave are privacy-focused and looks promising. Firefox seems to have made an interesting comeback too.

? Calendars - not much had changed isn’t it? It’s still an insular note-taking app for appointments. Still going back and forth with people arranging appointment dates and times. 

? Chat apps - Whatsapp being the current standard but look at how poorly featured it is compared to Telegram. I’m constantly amazed by how slow Whatsapp is in developing new features compared to Telegram, despite being the incumbent and having massive backing of Facebook.

? Goodreads - now under Amazon, the booklists app had withered under its lack of care. The UX is horrible and discovery of books difficult. 

What other household software products owned by huge tech corps is due for disruption?