“It’s a feature, not a product,” said Steve Jobs of Dropbox, after approaching founder Drew Houston about acquiring the file sync software.

Everything could be a feature, to Jobs. Cameras, alarm clocks, calculators—all features in the iPhone. Even Apple’s other products weren’t immune. The iPod was…

It almost felt like common knowledge that software was increasingly expensive. Yet was it, really? Had the move from boxed software and one-time licenses to subscriptions and SaaS had actually resulted in higher prices, we wondered?

So last year we picked 100 popular business software, dug through…

One day, Internet Explorer was nearly the only game in town, powering 96% of website visits at its peak in 2002. Then, quickly it turned into the app you only used to download Firefox or Chrome, or so the joke went. And then Internet Explorer died and turned into Chrome.

Empires rise then quickly…

When Jiro dreams of sushi, you’d hardly imagine him slicing sashimi with an ordinary, dull knife. Nor would you expect Usain Bolt to cross the finish line in shoes you could pick up at an outlet, the London Symphony Orchestra to grab the cheapest violins at the local music store, or Ford to take on…

The problems with email were there from the beginning.

You’d be reading documentation, see something to improve, and wish you could tell the author.

For MIT’s programming staff in 1965, that idea led to the invention of email. “A new command should be written to allow a user to send a private…

It took little under a decade for the headline feature developer Jon Skinner added to Sublime Text’s second version to become one of the defining features of this decade’s software.

“Goto Anything” is how it started, a search pane to jump to other files. Open a folder, press CMD/Ctrl+P, start…

It’s hard enough to convince people to pay for software, much less unfinished software quits working merely 9 months after purchase. Not Apple. When the first beta of Mac OS X came out in 2000, fans paid $29.95 for the…

When Google launched their online office suite with Docs and Sheets in 2006, feature parity with Microsoft Office wasn't the focus. Neither was a price tag of free, or cross-platform support by virtue of being a web app. Instead, Google focused on the pain of emailing documents back and forth to…

Email seems impossible to tame. It’s everything: your online address, the bit of identifiable data you use to sign up for apps, apply for jobs, work with clients and colleagues, message friends, follow newsletters, and on and on the list goes. And as such, your inbox isn’t just a list of unread…

Free is a hard genie to put back in the bottle.

When Microsoft charged $999 for Office in 1990, little did they dream that 16 years later, their greatest competitor would be a free office suite from Google—along with dozens of small, often free apps that individually did many of the same tasks as…

A dollar today is worth a bit more than a dollar tomorrow, something we’ve learned from experience since childhood. Yet thanks in part to Moore’s Law, technology flipped the equation on its head. First appliances, then computers, then TVs and phones seemed to offer more and better features each…