Earlier quoted context omitted.
The context behind this article is that a lot of people (not me) find the innovative thing about Gmail is precisely that it doesn't render email threads as messages built into trees, but instead clusters them into these flat groups (which FWIW I think most people do associate with the term "thread", as you are browsing by thread, not by message). The article then goes through how they came to this new model, rather t…
OK, but that can't be realistically described as solving an "impossible problem". The problem is how to associate emails into threads -- which was solved before gmail came around. What you're talking about is how those threads are presented to the user. That's just a UI decision, not solving something difficult.
Re: Gmail Solved the "Impossible" Problem
#11Many people consider(ed) the problem of how to present email in a way that they understand -- not a crazy tree exposing the underlying reply structure -- difficult, as they had never experienced such.