In 1899 Charles H. Duell, was quoted as saying, “everything that can be invented has been invented.” To our ears, he sounds like an ignorant old hayseed. You could fill oceanliners with the gobs of stuff that has been invented since then.

But I have to admit I can relate to the statement. Everywhere I look on the internet I see the same old crap. Recombinations of old ideas. Mostly minor improvements on “old” ideas that were created only just months ago. I suppose as an industry we’re just iterating on our own ideas. I suppose it’s healthy.

But I can’t help thinking it’s getting a little old. I’m not pretending we’re above this criticism. Some people have said that Staction was just Twitter+Basecamp. Jumpchart was called “a specialized wiki.” Paprika is probably an even smaller evolutionary leap.

We’ve been working for seemingly endless months on tweaks to our current apps. In the background we’ve been dreaming of new apps. I have lists of ideas. Many lists, -big lists. I can pretty much summarize them for you, -they’re all essentially just a different way to collect data from form fields and process it. That’s what all productivity apps do.

So what can you do to invent? Someone types text on a keyboard, and you store it. Or use rudimentary processing to try and understand it. Or attach meta information to it to try and make it more useful. Ad infinitum.

So have we as an industry maxed out the number of ways we can creatively combine todos, milestones, text, and files? What’s the next thing in productivity apps?