1Password X: A look at the future of 1Password in the browser
As a long-time happy customer of 1Password I have quite a bit of a problem with them pushing their new hosted product. If you want to offer that as an alternative by all means do but don&#x27;t make it the only long-term option.<p>I would have no problem with paying a monthly fee or paying for every major version (as I have done in the past when applicable) but I think for this use case being able to choose where to host your data - or to not host it at all - is much more justified than it arguably already is with SaaS products in other areas.<p>1Password certainly know their cryptography but do they also know how to secure servers and networks? I must say I trust Apple or Dropbox a lot more on this matter.<p>In general, the tendency to build and provide every aspect of a service is bothering me. Otherwise known as the Not-invented-here syndrome, which we largely thought to have overcome with the Internet and the age of hosted software, particularly Web 2.0 kind of SaaS offerings, this development amounts to tight coupling and agglomeration of features that are secondary to the benefit of the actual product at hand:<p>Why does every application apparently have to provide these features:<p>- file hosting and serving<p>- calendaring and event notification<p>- messaging<p>- PDF export<p>- and most famously: Email (&quot;Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.&quot;)<p>Why is it so hard to provide just the core features of your product and use other products and services by providers specialising in those to implement ancillary features required for building a product or service?<p>We still have to go a long way in terms of connecting with and building upon other services, one particularly preposterous example of which I recently encountered with a supply chain management process where a company used two perfectly fine - if slightly aging - applications to keep track of different but related data sets. In order to exchange data between these applications a PDF containing the relevant data is exported from application A, sent via email and finally manually entered into application B again.<p>The waste created by processes like this never ceases to amaze me.