Paul Ford essay 'The Web Is More Than Enough'
Archived — this story has rotated out of today’s deck. It is kept here in full.
The gist
Technologist Paul Ford published "The Web Is More Than Enough" after his browser office suite drew a crowd.
The essay argues browser tools now let individuals build apps once reserved for big teams.
Background
Paul Ford is a technologist, essayist and contributing Opinion writer who built TinyLittleOffice, a web-based office suite that stores its data in the URL itself. The essay followed that project's launch and reception: the server went down under the traffic, and Ford says hosting still cost $0 even after he entered his credit card. Ford argues the browser's power has been obvious for 20 years, but the cost of tapping it is falling, and that browser technologies were so complex largely because they were built for teams like Google's, not individuals.
How it unfolded
- recentlyFord launched tinylittleoffice.com, an office suite that stores data in the URL; so many people visited that the server went down, and after he put in his credit card a couple hundred thousand people came by.
- recentlyReception split: people on Hacker News insisted TinyLittleOffice was a pointless waste of time, while folks on GitHub began asking for features and fixes; it briefly reached the top ten of Product Hunt.
- Oct 15, 2026The Register published an article about TinyLittleOffice, described as "where the link is the document."
- Oct 20, 2026Simon Willison wrote about his web-based browser 3D game Battle Drones.
- Oct 21, 2026Ford published "The Web Is More Than Enough" in The Aboard Newsletter.
- Oct 30, 2026The New York Times published a guest essay by Ford, "The Open Secret Buried in Anthropic's 300-Page I.P.O. Filing."
Key terms
- Hacker News
- A social news website focused on computer science and entrepreneurship, run by Y Combinator.
- GitHub
- A repository is a storage space on GitHub where developers keep and manage their project's code and files.
- Product Hunt
- An American website where users share and discover new products, ranked by daily upvotes.
Source: Wikipedia
Who’s saying what
- Expert
- Ford says the browser is very powerful software for building applications and the cost of accessing that power is going down seemingly every day.
- Public
- People on Hacker News insisted TinyLittleOffice was a pointless waste of time.
- Support
- Folks on GitHub asked for features and fixes to TinyLittleOffice, and it briefly reached the top ten of Product Hunt.
Still unverified
Ford writes that he thinks you can even hyphenate text reliably these days, "although I refuse to believe it."