Law of Software Envelopment

September 24, 2007

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”
— Zawinski’s Law

Coined by Jamie Zawinski, a engineer on an early release of Netscape navigator, to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that). Examples of this law are Emacs and, of course, Netscape/Mozilla.

I quoted this in my AjaxWorld talk today, regarding the release of Webtop 1.2 which is now available for trial download (more on that later).

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