“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” — Marshall McLuhan

Ben Evans “Hence, channeling Marshall McLuhan, new tools start out being made to fit the existing workflows, but over time the workflows change to fit the tools.”

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/21/office-messaging-and-verbs

In a post speaking of Slack and sw envirnments for productivity

“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.”

started from a post on Microsoft capitulation, giving up on Windows everywhere which in hindsight helped to go back on top of the tech world

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/7/8/capitulation

This is turning into Ben Evans quotes “That is, Google tests new opportunities to see if they fit in the same way that a shark bites a surfer to see if they’re a seal. If not, you don’t change Google to fit the opportunity – you spit out the surfer (or what’s left of him). ”

Google as a “vast machine learning engine”

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/4/14/what-does-google-need-on-mobile