Is the wireless Web the future? Will broadband finally give birth to interactive television? Will peer-to-peer programs like Napster prove to be a fad or a fixture?

Anyone who claims to know sure answers to these questions is a fraud; experience counsels skepticism, if not cynicism. While the big money waits to see which future pans out, though, I have some more modest suggestions for products and technologies the industry could be providing today -- innovations that might not change the world but would certainly make life easier for those of us who depend on computers for our here-and-now work.

Industrial-strength e-mail software that never lets you down

Long ago the world realized that e-mail was the "killer app" not only of the Internet itself but of the entire "new economy." Fast, cheap and out of control, e-mail now dominates the high-tech workplace and is its one essential tool, surpassing even the Web itself on the can't-live-without-it meter. My own daily e-mail volume -- like that of many of you reading this, I don't doubt -- long ago crossed the line into four figures.

When you need to deal with that kind of e-mail load, you need to be able to count on your e-mail software. You need it to be able to filter hundreds of incoming messages fast. You want great indexing and search capabilities. Most of all, you want it to be able to store gigabytes worth of mail without choking. And you have to count on it not to crash and burn and corrupt the files your work life depends on.

Today, what are your options? For the heavy-duty professional user, Web-based e-mail is a joke. Old Unix e-mail tools are reliable but clumsy, and not much help unless you're using Unix or one of its variants. Microsoft Outlook is the default choice for millions, but it stores all your e-mail in one big file (while archiving older mail) and begins to stutter and die when that file gets too big. Eudora, my friend over the years on both Macs and PCs, is pretty good, but it still crashes more often than it should, and as your e-mail volume increases its anomalies multiply.

Some of these problems arise because for too long e-mail "client" software has been treated as a throwaway or a giveaway rather than an essential business tool. Other problems no doubt stem from the way these e-mail programs interact with the operating systems they depend on to manage and manipulate the large files that result from our accumulation of monster e-mailboxes.

But so what? I guarantee that any company that brings to market a truly bulletproof e-mail program that scales up to today's volume of e-mail will find throngs of customers willing to pay hard cash for the productivity and peace of mind such software would bring. I will be first in line.

Computers and operating systems that don't take five minutes to start up

Every time you boot your computer you wait precious minutes while it laboriously loads its operating system, along with all the other crud that has insinuated itself into your start-up queue over the years. While the loss of a few minutes here and there might not seem like that much, multiply it by millions of users and hundreds of times a year and you have a stunning productivity loss. Laptop users are hit especially hard by boot-up delays.

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.