Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to the practice and the study of how people acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve, archive and discard information for various reasons in physical and digital worlds. Many PIM tools are available for managing information on our desktop computers while many research prototypes have tried to augment or replace them. The development of these tools was based on knowledge drawn from the fields of psychology, human–computer interaction, information retrieval, knowledge management and research in the PIM field. Different metaphors and ways of organizing were introduced. However, the prevailing beliefs are that most of these prototypes were not extensively tested and that the radical design (not addressing real-world issues) and quick abandonment of prototypes prevented transfer to mainstream products. This paper looks at what has been developed and learnt, what has been transferred to mainstream applications, discusses the possible reasons behind these trends and challenges some parts of the above-mentioned beliefs.