The 4 waves of the PC era - what's coming next?

I have been noodling for a while over this post by Om Malik: http://bit.ly/bNwuUP

WHAT’S HAPPENED? WHAT’S COMING?

I wanted to throw my own oar into the pond on this one, as it’s a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about over the last year or two, as we’ve turned our vague ideas about where “Apps” were going into a beta-product allied to a bold vision for the future.

You can slice and dice trends in many ways. The truth is there’s something fractal about the nature of trends - the closer you look at them the more they splinter into smaller and smaller fibres of subtrends, movements, products etc. People are eager to jump from the neatly titled Web 2.0 into something they can call Web 3.0 while labeling the dot.com boom some sort of Web 1.0. This is fundamentally wrong because the web was only part of why so many people suddenly wanted the Internet - indeed for most just getting an email address was the initial intent. All schemas to describe the complexity of technological progress are inherently flawed in their omission and simplification, but I have found it helpful is to think of four waves.

Yahoo! Mail - can it be saved?

It pains me to see Yahoo! becoming the butt of jokes in the start-up community, particularly as for so many of us they were an inspiration, once upon a time.  But, sadly, common wisdom round these parts is that they’re walking dead, losers, a place good companies go to die.  I sincerely hope they can claw back from that.

Like almost everyone who’s been online for more than a decade (two decades for me) I have a Yahoo! Mail account.  But I hate using it.  It stays alive as the repository for old messages I don’t want to lose and as a place where various signups and memberships still contact me.  Indeed I use it still as an address for signups I fear may be spammy.

I was wondering how Yahoo! Mail could win me back as a user.  It won’t replace GMAIL but maybe they could still be a genuine secondary mail account for me.  The conclusion I came to is simple.  If they provided a good tool to easily sort through and file old messages, weed out spam or unwanted membership communications, it could regain utility.  I don’t mean wading through page after page and trying to sort and select and delete.  There must be a better way to do that.

I cannot be the only person who looks at 17,000 unread emails and closes down again thinking it’s not worth fighting with.