Office, messaging and verbs — Benedict Evans

Excerpt from an insightful productivity perspective, highlighting Slack and Quip as potential leading indicators

"Ironically, Lotus Notes, one of the earliest corporate messaging programs, was intended to be much more than email, calendaring and so on - there was a vision of a unified development environment, database and messaging system - 'groupware'. It didn't quite work out like that, and actually using Lotus Notes as I had to 15 years ago was rather like using an email client built with Microsoft Access - theoretically possible but not a very good idea. OLE in the 1990s was another concept that didn't quite work, embedding pieces of one program's document inside another. But today, Facebook's platform on the desktop is pretty much Ray Ozzie's vision built all over again but for consumers instead of enterprise and for cat pictures instead of sales forecasts - a combination of messaging with embedded applications and many different data types and views for different tasks. Hence, one could propose one future model as 'Facebook for the enterprise', but with the platform, not the social, being the point of the analogy. "

Office, messaging and verbs — Benedict Evans