Office, messaging and verbs — Benedict Evans
TLDR
- New tools initially replicate old workflows; over time, workflows restructure around the tools, making the original tools obsolete.
Key Takeaways
- CC Baxter’s 1960 insurance office illustrates how entire floors of human calculators were replaced not by better calculators but by mainframes serving the same business need differently.
- Microsoft Office’s ~1 billion deployed copies span legitimate power users and people using it as a workaround for tasks it was never designed for, like Excel as a database or desktop publisher.
- The PowerPoint-to-email pipeline used by executives today gets killed not by better presentation software but by SaaS dashboards with real-time data, alerts, and Slack integrations.
- Productivity breaks down into underlying verbs: analyze, delegate, report, confer, decide, track. Each generation of tools encodes those verbs differently; the verbs themselves change slower than the tools.
- Lotus Notes and OLE attempted unified messaging-plus-data environments in the 1990s and failed on usability; Facebook’s consumer platform effectively rebuilt that vision for a different audience and use case.
Why It Matters
- The correct competitive frame for productivity software is not “simpler/cheaper alternative” but “does this eliminate the underlying task entirely via a different mechanism.”
- Hardware assumptions follow tool assumptions: keyboard and windowed OS are only mandatory if the task is still document creation, not if the underlying job is flagging dashboard changes for three colleagues.
- ‘Send’ has been the universal verb tying all enterprise communication together; the open question is what displaces it and what new unified data-plus-messaging layer replaces the email-as-connector model.
Benedict Evans · ** · Read the original