I had a similar feeling when egroups[1] was announced. We were all using mailing lists at the time, and what was clever about that? The clever bit was that end users didn't have to set up and host majordomo themselves. Now egroups itself never came to much, but the idea of taking complex applications (mailing lists, email, CRM, ..) and turning them into SaaS is pretty massive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGroups