When I said we, I meant all of us, including developers. Economic forces had a lot to do with it, of course, but developers flocked to SaaS business models and away from traditional native apps. This is a huge loss for user control of their data.

Imagine if that hadn't happened! I think we would have amazing tools for managing our information locally, in a highly automated and intuitive way.

The seeds of these possibilities are everywhere. Search, of course, but also things like tagging and even automatic tagging with with machine learning models. Imagine if Chrome had the same tools for organizing bookmarks as Gmail has for tagging email, plus all of the power of recommendation engines under the user's control.

No, instead Google keeps bookmarks extremely underpowered because they'd rather have people search for everything all the time in order to drive traffic to their ads.