In fact, I would say that that is the least of what is revolutionary about Chandler.

I've been fascinated by Lotus Agenda for a few years now. It dovetails quite nicely with a topic that has been near and dear to my heart -- extracting useful information from random information sources. When it was a shipping product, I wasn't aware of it, so I missed it completely. But now, Lotus has released it for free (from here if you've got access to a 720K disk drive (I didn't), or here for a fully installed version that needs to be copied to c:/agenda), and it runs fine on XP, so I expect that it will run fine on all previous verisons of Windows.

Download it; play with it. It's addictive. I'm now taking all my work notes in it. It's great -- you just start typing and it just starts capturing. You can go back later and extract useful information. If you mention a date in the text, even if it's something like "The day after tomorrow," it will figure out what you meant and extract that date into another bit of data that it then tags the entry with.

Chandler is a project that will bring Agenda-like functionality into the present time. Email becomes just another way to get data into the program -- you can then use categories and vviews to get useful information out of the streams of randomness that fly into your mailbox.

I look at Chandler and I see a tool that can manage much more than my email. But it seems that a lot of people on the list are stuck on the whole email client bit, suggesting email features like spam filters and the like. Those features are certainly important, but my wish is that the basic Agenda-like functionality be rolled out as soon as it can. The email stuff can be built on top of that core.

If all we do is focus on beating Outlook at it's own game, Outlook will have already won, because Outlook gets to dictate what's in play. But if we instead come up with a new category of software (Agenda originally defined what a PIM is, but the definition seems to have moved over the years to a smaller, less powerful subset of features), and then show how it can do what Outlook does, and much much more, then we will have done something useful.

It's still possible to fall into the Lotus Notes trap. Notes is a very powerful program that just happens to also do email. And so it makes its way into organizations as an email program, and the rest of the functionality starts to lay unused. Perhaps someone discovers the power and a new usage patterns starts to arise, but more often than not it doesn't, and people start complaining that it doesn't make a very good email solution, especially when faced with what Outlook can do in a corporation that can afford a full Exchange installation.

I want Chandler to ship. I want my Agenda.

Strike that, what I really want is Agenda with an integrated Outliner. Radio is close. Really close. I keep wondering how hard it would be to do something like Agenda's categories and views in it.

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