A reminder that there are no absolutes
I am a huge fan of the shift to server side applications development. Applications hosted on the server side can co-mingle data in ways that provide value for all of the participants in a network - think page rank. But as soon as I have settled comfortably into my server side prejudice, I stumble across something that messes up my tidy world. This time it was Xobni, the Outlook plugin that indexes the Outlook file on your desktop and provides surprisingly useful utilities based on those analytics.
You could do the same thing for Gmail but you would need an API from Google to get at the data set. Maybe they will provide it maybe they won’t. But possession is nine tenths of the law. With outlook the data is on your desktop.
So after several years of watching all of the innovative stuff coming from the server side, here is an example of where innovation is happening on the desktop.