The impossible dream of good workplace software
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Hello, welcome to decoder. I'm in like Peter editor and chief of the verge and decoder is my show that big ideas, no problems today i'm talking my good friend David pierce, whose my coast on the verge chest and the virtuous at large. And we're talking about something that David spends honestly too much time thinking and writing about software specifically.

We're talking about the software you use at work, stuff you like or maybe just tolerate news everyday, the stuff you would probably te and try to avoid using in all costs and the stuff you love and hate because your job revolves are on using IT all day long. It's fair to say the businesses of all kinds changed. Radical one software entered the office.

That's the foundation of the famous mark and recent quotes software eating the world. And now that seems like it's all about to change again as AI automates more and more of that software. At least that if you believe all the CEO who we've come on the coder and last year telling me that's what's about to happen, these tools are all usually lump together in a big bucket we called enterprise software, but there are often meaningful overlap SE at the popular productivity tools many of us use in our regular lives as well.

So first I wanted dave, his help, and just defining IT all. Then I wanted to talk about how it's designed and how that design shapes how we work every day and subbed empowering ways that everything from the big, familiar bundles like microsoft office three sixty five in google workplace all the way down to familiar single tools like suck. But as you'll here, David explained, we're starting to see scores of new apps crop up to handle very specific use cases built around clever metaphors and interesting new interfaces that try and rewire our brains to make us work differently, hopefully faster, more efficiently and lately, more remotely.

Sometimes that works, and sometimes IT really, really does not. Something is changing about software at work, and I often find the best way to understand the future is to take a moment and consider the present OK David peers software work. Here we go.

David pears, welcome to decoder.

Thank you. It's an honor.

Is this your first time on decoder?

Ironically, I hosted the show before I was a guest on the show. I did a thing was on host a while ago when you were off somewhere. But now I get to be here talking to you.

What's interesting as uni host another show together, but usually when we do other episodes that show i'm the guest and you're the host and now the tables have finally turned. I know don't know how I feel about IT. Only the penalty is that you have to talk about enterprise software on this.

I've brought this on myself.

I so it's it's very much the difference between the coder and the vercheres is on this sha. We're going to talk with IT in a Price software, a great land. So you are in addition to hosting the verge chest with me and being enter large of the verge also, right? Installation, which is our newsletter, where you try all kinds of software, I believe you do. This is a form of therapy because you are addicted to software, which I am worried about you as your friend. I'm worried this is a problem that you have, but IT means you have tried a lot of .

software in your life. I have I think i've come to see this as less of a procrastination technique of taking all of the tasks that I have in one place and putting them in another place rather than completing any of because IT still feels productive even though I have to do anything as constantly rethinking the way that I do everything, which again, you could argue that's not productive at all. It's probably not.

But I, I, I have spent probably more time thinking about how I do stuff than almost anyone I know. I don't know if it's useful. I don't know if that helps. I end up just back in the same apps four hundred different times a year. But IT is the thing I have spent way to much time and energy on over the years.

is the way that I always think about enterprise software and software work is the mark Andrew and quote, software is eating the world. There's a lot of ways to interpret that quote. But what I specifically think about is that all of the things you do at work will go from being paper and pencil, or, I know, sculpting clain models to using software in laptop, right? Like fundamentally, all of people's work will be done in software.

And then we've had so many cars on the shop on the show and say, the second start making investment software. Now we've made a forever investment software. Where is going to keep spending money on developing software, on software engineers and maintain ing the software and figure out our cloud storage bills.

We're now we're just doing software. All they want is that generally right? Is that how you see the the growth of enterprise software that we used to have floors of accountants and now we ve got floors of people using excel?

Yeah and I actually think that is the right way to think about IT, right, that it's not that we replaced floors of accountants with nothing or with one magical computer that does all of our accounting for us. We just changed the tools that we use. And in so many ways, the idea of our productivity being replaced by machines turns out to not be true nearly as much as IT is.

The tools of our productivity are replaced by machines. And I think that's what we ve seen with software, where we all went from adding machines and paper to doing the same, arguably more work with computers. And the same thing is gonna en with A I really IT wasn't that long ago that everybody was like, oh, because of the styal revolution and then computers, we won't have to work forty hours a weekend anymore.

We're all going to be sufficient with this new technology that we're just going to work eight hours a week and get the same amount done. WPS, that didn't happen. But I think that, that transition is exactly right. And I think the thing that comes after account using excel is the question.

And I going to hold you to that because later, i'm we're doing and talk about what A I will cost us first to started a high level. And when I try to define some categories of enterprise and productivity software with you, there's enterprise software, which a software is sold to big businesses and that can be a lot of different things.

Google workspace, microsoft office, classic enter Price software, everybody needs a word processor, their computer at their desk, you can just pay, proceed. Here is this productive software, a email clients, whatever that is, whatever that set of things is, one kind enterprise software. Then there's I know whatever runs your industrial robots, right? Procurement, there's that.

Then there's productivity support consumers use, people plan their weddings and notion and fellow, you try all the stuff you play with, all the stuff you you cover. This industry pretty extensively can draw definition for us here. How is how do you think about the different lines?

I think your categorization is almost right. I think I would shift the microsoft office in google workspace more into the productivity tool thing. I think the way i've come to see IT, basically like their software you use everyday, there's the software you hope you never have to use, and then there's the software you definitely never have to use.

And the software you definitely never have to use is like the stuff that runs the robots, right? There's like a personate, your company whose job IT is to use that software and no one else will ever touch. And there's a ton of that software out there.

That's everything from like compliance software, which is like vastly big and powerful and important. And most people should never once in their lives have to encounter compliance software. So that's one side of IT all the way. The other side you have the productivity sorts, right? So that's like the google dox and gmail, microsoft word and excel and the stuff that people do their jobs inside of.

And then in middle, there is all the sort of messy stuff that everybody hates the most, don't like the H R software and the travel booking software and the way to set up I T tickets and all of the things that make a company work, but aren't technically how you do your job in most cases. Is that kind of messy medal? And people hate the software the most, I think, in the middle because it's not the stuff of use every day.

So you don't build systems around that. You don't learn the inside out of IT. You just encounter performance management software four times here, you are required to do IT, but you don't have to do IT long enough to actually care about IT.

And so I think those are the three different buckets of IT that i've come to see over time. And obviously, all of them are gigantic businesses. All of them cater to completely different people, and all of them are adverting levels of invisible to how most people actually wanna do their jobs all the time.

Yeah, I feel like a fair warning for the audience. Here is a David love software. And my goal, life is to never use software work.

If I could get to the point in my career where people bring me print outs of things and I circle them with sharpie and send them away, the dream, truly the dream that I I work towards everyday. I'm farther from that dream with every passing minute. Yeah, IT feels like .

every day we get further from the light of inter things on paper.

It's not going to add in for me, but it's what I think about because I am the person you're describing who encounters the software and thinks, why is this making me work this way? Why am I learning some metaphor that the expense software wants me to learn? Just to say, I bought dinner for my team.

I I don't care about any of this. I just think you to pay me back for the dinner I bought for the team. And IT feels like those metaphors are like, really what is getting sold over and over again, both in the productivity zone and then in the your company needs to functions zone.

And IT feels to me very much like you sell metaphor. That is the promise that the exciting thing, hey, if everybody just worked to this way, you'd be so much more productive. And then the reality is you look at the expense APP and you're like, well, actually just want to throw my fell in the ocean.

Yes, what? And I think the if everybody worked this way, that would be great is the great truism m and mistake of the software industry because it's just impossible. The idea that you're going to get an entire large group of people to all understand a single system in process than tool for getting things done is borderline impossible.

And so if you're a software company, you basically have one of two options. You can either build a piece of software that is so unbelievably specific and opinionated that you literally can't use IT any other way than that serious ly. And this is like a non crazy way to build offer that there is literally only one way to use IT.

It's not that there's even right or wrong ways. There's literally only one way to use IT. And you can actually get a pretty long way doing that because people will hate IT, but they will use IT correctly because it's the only way to use IT or what you end up trying to do.

And this is over time be much more uh, enticing and popular path. But also like the path to ruin is you try to be everything to everyone all the time and and you say, okay, your boss wants to use this piece of software and they want to use IT this way, that's insect. But your boss is the one who pays for this.

And so you have to do IT because your boss said so. But what we're going to give you is, is a million other buttons and knobs depress and twist so that maybe you'll find the thing that you like. And the hope is you can build this sort of great domaines or software across everything.

And that I build microsoft word and and IT eventually IT gets away from you, right? You build the thing that does everything to everybody, and then all student that becomes dislike. Overwhelming mess of a piece of software and at all falls apart. But those are only two moves.

And so like I, I really have come to feel for these companies over times, because you have I T managers who buy a lot of the software who want one thing, you have bosses who demand a lot of the software, who wants something completely different. And then you have the people who actually to use this software all day, everyday, who are having this a voice upon them and b dictated to them how they have to use IT. I don't know that is even possible to build something that makes all three of those groups happy. I certainly have not seen one that seems like IT works for everybody.

What's suck like this in the context of some pieces of software. So IT doesn't matter if you run a newsroom like we run a the verge, run a small legal practice or you run a fortune, have another corporation, you've got some set of needs, right? You you people need to talk to each other, whether some email or slacks. You probably need to make something, hopefully your business, unless you're just making fraud, in which case, call me, I would like to you have services code with you, but you know you got to take something in and you got to put something up, right? That most businesses Operate on this principle.

So you need some software helps you make the thing that you're making, whether that is the software running your 3d printer or for us， it's the software that makes the website, if you work at a little practice, microsoft word, some software where you're productive or you're making something and then there's just the i'm Operating my business piece of IT right, which is usually microsoft excel, right? You've got your i'm doing my financial modeling. I've H R software tracking my employees and running my payer.

All that is another far. There's a few ways to think I just buying that stuff, right? You can buy a big bundle from some enterprise provider or not. We have a lot of CEO coming to show. And the sea of male chp was like, what I do is I sell you the software to email your customers and then I sell you the entire back off a solution that runs your website and you're building and everything else as well. That's the co square.

Sy said that to us, C O weeks, and that to us, they want to set up the website for the yoga studio and then run the entire yoga studios business so the yoga people can teach the yoga. That's one big bundle software you can buy or you can piece together all the best in class competence, the ones that works best for you from all the independent providers and hope they work together. Which approaches is winning right now?

You think it's it's a strange overlap right now. Actually, there was a long period of time where the bunglers were winning. And you would start, like you said, with one need, and you would say, OK, if you are male chain, we're going to make IT really easy free to email a lot of people.

And then you see the thing that people leave male trip for during their day. But we could just build that thing. We can build Better C R, M. software. So you don't have to go elsewhere to make the stuff in ordered and tie, and then you just sort of slowly build up from there.

And that's sufficiently to win because fundamentally, all these companies would like to pay less money for their software and manage fewer things and have fewer contracts to deal with. And the bungling becomes very useful. What is also generally true is that it's very hard to do a lot of things really well simultaneously.

Uh, and so I mean, it's the the truism of technology is right, it's bundle ling. And on bundle ling, and I think we we were in a really intense bundling phase for a really long time, and then the pandemic happened. And we unbundled so fast because all of a sudden everybody is at home, everybody had new software needs, and everybody needed them like tomorrow.

And so everybody went like, literally tomorrow, where he was like, is like, oh, i'm not going to the office again for four years. I need new kinds of software. And so everybody just went out and looked for, okay, we need we need a new way to do collaboration design.

We need a new way to do video cost, and we can't wait for someone else to attach IT to the contract that we have. We're just going to go to sign up for the thing that everybody likes to the best. That's why zoom got huge, even though other video tools existed, right?

That's why things like F, I G, ma started to take off because people just needed these new workplace. And so there was this massive rush towards these so called best of breed things. And then what obvious ly started to happen is the big company started detect that stuff on microsoft build teams, google invest in meat, and so zoom becomes less competitive in its own way.

But what wild to me is the this company octo a, which does basically like logged in a unch of other itself like you're talking about. They started as a way to log into services and out there like a whole giant back and authentications of that they do ah they do this really good survey called businesses at work every year. And the wildest thing in, I believe, that was the twenty twenty three one was that half the people who pay for microsoft office also pay for google workspace, and half the people who pay for microsoft office also pay for resume.

And so we're in this place to her. We are very much in the sense of like you sort of need the basic bundle, but then everybody is still in this moment, willing to spend the money on at least like a handful of the tools that work around IT. So right now, microsoft is trying to keep building the walls around its bundle, and you seeing the same from a company like salesforce, which what slack, so that you spend more time in the sales force universe.

But these individual apps that exist around them, in many cases, are just so much Better that no one else has been able to catch up to them yet. Like meat is Better, teams is Better. People still really like zoom, and I don't think that's changing anytime soon.

One of the things is really interesting about your description of the time when there is all of the new apps are necessarily in the cloud. Everybody went home. We all have to work on mine together necessarily.

We are gona work in web browsers in a collaboration environment together and particularly on desktop. There's no action in native apps. There's a little bit of action in native apps on mobile for over highty reasons that we've talked to lots of CEO about on the show, didn't feel see a figura.

You gotto build IT natively on IOS because the browsers and good enough to let me do fy gman the browser on IOS. The second, open your math book. The browsers are good enough. And he is like, this is where I should deploy application.

This is where immediate distribution, the idea that all of these project apps work in the cloud so we can all collaborate together in in all the data stored centrally and you want to sink IT. That seems like the end of the road for the desktop productivity application. You know you write installer, you see any glimmers that some huge powerful mac APP is going to show up or some huge, powerful windows APP is going to show up, run locally on your computer and revolutionize the business world.

okay. I'm i'm going to to say this and I should preface by saying I have I have very little quantitative tive evidence for IT, but IT is starting to be a thing. I hear more and more in talking to folks to make this stuff.

I think it's coming back. You do, I really do. And I think, again, this goes back to these sort of divergent needs of two group of people, right? You have the stuff in the cloud is is easier to manage in so many ways, right? It's it's easier to understand who has IT, where is easier to provision on different people's computers, is easier to manage you know where your data is like from a from a corporate management standpoint.

It's just Better in so many ways to have stuff that is based in the cloud, except I don't know if you ve noticed this, but everything seems to be down all the time now everybody is getting hacked all the time. And suddenly the idea that the cloud is actually like a say first saying or simpler er place for your data, I don't think feels true to people in the way that IT wants dead. And like all of that now was standing questions about, is my self being trained for A I purposes? Do I want the A I soft? That is coming to all of these things.

I think you're starting to see this shift towards what some people in this in street called local first software. And basically, it's this huge sort of rearchitects ting of the way that we think about files really away from the idea that like a file lives in the cloud and you and I both open an APP and act on that file to get that file can live on my computer as as an offline local file that is mine in like a real meaningful way. But still you and I can act on IT together in a collaborative way that's possible to do.

It's just much harder software, and we're only getting good at building that stuff now. But I think it's it's stuff that works offline, which like god help you if you're on a plane or in bad wifi or anything like it's so hard to do anything without the internet now. And I think people notice that and we're coming back to this idea of like, I want something that feels fast, which means that has to be local.

I want something that is mine in a real way, like it's a file I can see on my computer. I think that stuff is coming back and IT matters to people. We're going to see that best of both worlds where we get the collaboration thing, we get the cloud access, we get the cross platform stuff. It's manageable by your organization. But IT has the same feeling of like I can just open a thing on my computer and IT if .

feels like that was the core way of thinking about things before broadband internet yeah like apple had entire software we called. I think .

that's right.

Remember and no one ever used IT because it's so complicated to the and in the cloud existed and then you you can just think everything over eyelid d and so I think one away, but the idea that you would maintain sink on files across devices in a fairly manual way that was built because the internet connections were not fast enough. And now you're saying the people don't trust the cloud enough. So we're going back to that model.

You can sort of argue that we skipped the correct middle step there. okay. Doing the thing right? You will you a file that has David presentation one and then you email back and as David presentation two and then final, final, final dot.

P, P, T, like, that sucks. We can all agree that that is bad, but we skipped over. How do we make IT easy for people to share things with each other all the way to, what if you didn't know any of your day, 哎。 And that we sort of left a good middle ground out there. And I think I would not that everything that is going to win, but I think there's going to be a push back towards the idea of like local on device. But still useful and in sink and collaboration stuff coming back.

that's a good place to take a break. I want to come back and I want to talk to you maybe just about slack for the rest of the episode de a boy, and put all these ideas into that little case study wherever.

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I'm back with verge edit large, they appears talking about the evolution of workplace suffer. David, we just talked about kind of a lot of ideas at once. The idea that everything would be in the cloud to the idea that everybody in the team had to buy into a way of working to make a lot of this productivity software actually functional and realization, the idea that the big players for boundless capabilities, but you would still have to some like reneging teams inside your company using the tool they want. And then, and our people caught this, you brought up the idea at sales four spot slack.

hoping nobody would.

So I just wanted put this into focus around slack in particularly because it's just a good case study. So just turned ten years old, you and I have covered the hell out of sack. I have to read steward butterfield, maybe not on the code to, but on the vercheres.

For sure. He was the founder, slack psych, was that especially revolution ten years ago, right? He was going to replace email. And then they kind of walk back from the idiot they are replacing email, embraced, replacing email again.

Then microsoft showed up with teams, which is mostly a video conferencing platform, that they added some slack like features and that everybody has micros office slack got out, competed in that way. They file, and I trust law hoods in europe. And then sales were just by slack.

And like what are saying the idea is you're going to use slack. Why not use our crm solution as well? Why shouldn't slack be that crm solution that you are using? You're talking your team about selling stuff. You're by using sales watch anyway. Now you can just chat to IT through whatever mark AI system that is being innovated in the first I watch dream force, I can tell you what's gone on, but that's basically the idea inside of that is the first thing we talked about, which is the whole point of sack, was that everybody would buy into a new kind of metaphor for working, and that would somehow change your company, make you more efficient IT actually turns out that metaphor maybe didn't take, and everyone just is like spammy each other or text messages.

Yeah, I think one of my great theories about slack is that everybody uses slack wrong, like everybody uses a slack wrong. And I think if if you rewind all way back to that initial launch of slack, you Better field. But this really great black post, it's called something like we don't sell, settles here.

And he basically outlines like the whole vision for what slack is going for and makes the argument that the biggest problem that most people don't understand, what they need slack for. And so slack job is not only to convince you that you need this, but that you need something like this in the first place. And their whole idea was basically to be a search engine for all your stuff at work.

If you really want to boil IT down. The idea behind slack was not to be a ChatApp IT, was to just be a place to put all your stuff and and all your stuff is is communication, its files. It's all these things that sort of you accumulate during the course of a workday.

And by having that all in one place that successful, you could build something really powerful. Super cool idea has nothing to do with what slack is and how is he is, right? We use slack as an email replacement, right? I think start was serious when he said they were not trying to kill email.

They were trying to like subsume IT inside of a different system, but they were always gonna be like, look, if if you, anna, send email to talk to each other, that's fine. But like when you, we need to share files, do IT in sack. I think that is much closer to what's lack wanted to be than what IT has become. And what IT became is this awful engagement bait APP that we all spent wait too much time and and never actually get any IT work done inside.

So I will note that the background info slack is searchable log of all communications and knowledge yeah whether not you start with the name, you end up the name reverse engineer the name that was the acronym. And the idea was that you would Operate slack at th Epace o f e mail.

IT wouldn't replace email, but you're talking you're making decisions and slack because you have A A history of all of the files and figures and conversations around those decisions. And then you could just go refer to IT, you could find IT. It's all it's all happening there. And what ended up really happening is everyone is just chatting real time in like a fractious, expanding number of of such channels in the service of this being case study. Where do you think that break down between the metaphors that lack one of people to use and the actual user behavior came from?

It's it's millennial and its text boxes, there's this long sort of mythological story about kinda, which was the old cm s that this unit, cocker and I have no idea of this attribute. That is a story I heard that I spiritually completely believe, which is that they ran an experiment at docker where if they change the size of the default text box in kinda IT would change how long people wrote.

If you give people a lot of space, make the text box big, they're going to write a lot in IT you feel the thing. If you make IT one line, people are going to write one line and hit enter right slack me at one line IT IT looks like a thing where you would send text messes IT doesn't look like an email in box. You don't have subjects.

You don't have two lines. You don't have a thing for a signature. Like, can you manage, view a signature at the bottom of every like message? You d look like a lunatic.

And so all of these, like product incentives, taught you to do IT really fast. The main thing, there was a single line of text, and everybody else uses a single line of text in messaging apps. And so we all just treated this thing like messaging apps.

And IT was a bunch of millennia ls who came into the workforce and are used to the like, type of thought present, type another thought present, type another the present. Like, if you get the text, that is two paragraphs from somebody, either somebody died or being broken up with the two options. And instead we just trained everyone to talk in work, like they talk to their friends in tax.

And culturally, I think that is really interesting and complicated. But IT immediately broke that paradigm that you're talking about, which is slack ever has always said the slack uses slack in a much more considered way. People write much longer things.

It's designed less for like a minute to minute updates of what you're doing all day and more for, like I hear what I accomplish during the day again so that someone can go find IT later. You're not expected, at lack to be in lot of rooms. There is a norm that if you need somebody, you mention them slack set up all these rules but didn't bake any of IT into the product.

They build a product that looks like text messaging. And so people use IT like text messaging. And sack has now spent the last decade being like, it's all about rules you have to set up, norms you have to teach each other. Had used the happens like, no, stop building me a text mesi still running slack.

And he came on the show. He talked a lot, have they on board people into slack and talk them, how do you slacked? And we spend a lot of time teaching new slack employees.

How do you slack? I had the same reaction as you, which is why isn't the product teach people how do you slack? And it's kind of all lay background. At the first, you said you can either build a very opinionated product that works extraordinary well for a small number people or you can just take all the training is off and that people sort of build whatever product they want and so that they can work however they want.

And that's how you get even like microsoft c cell, they can't take any features out of microsoft c cell and point people to a simpler version of IT because every five percent of users is millions of millions of people. Slack is in that zone. A lot of other products are in that zone.

Is IT just we have to go through other kinds of feds. We all used irc and emails. So then we we used tip chat for five minutes, then we used campfire, and now we used slack. And maybe one day, slack wall just fully give way to .

teams or whatever. maybe. I mean, I think to be clear, the idea that you should spend a lot of time training people how to use your most important products when they join your company is really good.

And no one does IT like you should have to spend a day learning how you are your company communicates when you join the company that such matters. And we just like hand people slack and they are like we do slack. And that as much as you get like know how do you slack? Like, sure, but I don't know how to use slike the way that you use slack, right? That's a matters a lot.

I talk to this woman, Laura Martin, who is like, google's productivity grew. And one of the things he recommends to everybody is like, just muck around in the settings. Just go spend ten minutes clicking all the button in the settings just to see how the thing works.

And like even one extra tick of understanding of the software goes an incredibly long way. But if you're slack and you both use this product and run your company on IT, the one does not absolve the other, right. You can and should train people on your company's best practices for slack.

That doesn't mean that everyone else should figure out your best practices, just kind of by osmosis. That's not how IT works. overwhelmingly. The question is, are we ever gonna too far and swing the pendula back? Because so far, there's really no evidence that are going to right?

There are a lot of people who complain that everything is moving too fast, and we're all to we're all too attached to these messaging systems and we can keep up with everything and it's making us crazy. And we all spend time and slack instead of actually doing our jobs. And there's just no indication that, that's going back.

You can actually think is that email represents a much sener more functional weight to run a business than inside of slack. But like, do you want to go back to email? I want to go back to email.

And so far, all we do is faster and bigger and more full of stuff, and we just kind of rely on people to solve IT for themselves. And either or we're going na get a set of really clever products that does that for us without killing the idea that people are being productive because. You have to make IT look like everyone is productive.

And one thinks like is very good at is making itself look really engaged. And when IT looks lively all the time, which makes managers and bosses feel like things are happening and that feels good, whether if you don't hear from anybody for eight hours because everybody working, what's everything. And so squaring those two things is really hard. But I think the only way we get off of this road to insanity that we're on with a lot of these communication tools is to find a way to do both of those things. And i'm honestly not sure .

what that looks like means wishing cost in that context for one second, we can keep picking on slack. And I think both of us are motivated to do all it's a little long fair, but we used very long. But if I was to say, okay, the virgins are using slack anymore.

We're switching back email. The switching cost of that would be almost impossibly high. I think we will just have a straight unity. We would not know how to work quite. Honey ly, if I shot up and I said we're gonna stop using conquer, we're gonna some other enterprise provider for expenses and travel.

I don't think our team would care a lot, but IT almost would be harder to switch because no one cares a lot like the I could bring down the dollars by some amount, ten percent, twenty percent. great. That's a good reason to switch.

But then everyone would, I would lose that in productivity because no one would pay attention to the email. There were switching out fans for flames or whatever we're doing. And then they would try to find an expense, they would use the old APP. And then I we were just be sort of running the individual training all the time. Is that something you can fix? Is that way you just get the bundle for, like, screw microsoft to do IT all for me is that the opportunity for any these companies to make an expense software that everyone love is so much that everyone actually .

pays attention to the emails. It's one really good reason to keep building your bundle. rape. If I have an expense product that you hate and someone else has an expense product that you hate that you actually already pay for, I can win that fight, right? That is the great chAllenge.

And so if you're trying to get into that world, you either need to be cheaper to make the the people who actually pay for this stuff happy. You either need to be like vastly Better, like I think even being slightly Better doesn't get there. You have to be like orders of magnitude Better or you have to do something else that the existing apps don't do like.

I think one one really good example is in the expenses world. I wouldn't swear to this, but I think it's true that expensive y was the first company to really do a good job of letting you take a picture of a receipt and turn to do an expense upload. Unbelievable, like the greatest thing that ever happened to the product of tracking expenses was being able to take a picture of a receipt and have IT like OCR out all the relevance of entertained new expense.

I think IT was expensive. Y who did that? I don't know who I was for sure, whoever IT was.

Congratulations you you win. And they did. And that like expensive y became hugely successful based on having like a good mobile APP, right? That's a thing when you can add something meaningful to that, that goes a really long way for those kind of middle teer products you encounter, but don't really care about all that much. There's just not that much surface areas to do that.

But then the stuff of people use day, the switching cost is so much tired because it's so much more entrenched trying to get someone to stop using an APP that they hate but have used for ten years is so so hard. Even if they hate IT, they will tell you every single day that they hate IT and you'll say, here's another one, it's Better and y'll say, oh god, because people don't care. Most people have jobs to do, right? Like most people do not use software for a living. They they use software as little as possible so that they can go do the thing that they do for a living. And I feel like that is the exact right baLance for those people, and software gets that wrong where instead they're like here's more stuff for you to do comes switch to our .

software and people like nothing you why have a microsoft and google just run away with? This is IT and I trust litigation is IT that they're not good at everything they try to do is that google kills its products too fast.

I mean, something that they have run away with this, right? I'm convinced that excel is the single sickest piece of often are on earth. You see that and here all the time that like the companies are mentioning that pay for microsoft office, but also pay for zoom or workspace or whatever.

That's all excel man, that is all excel. Like you can build good presentations after you can build good document editing, no one can beat excel IT is just not possible. And who pays for itself is the people who use excel all day.

So excel is so sticky. And the problem is, yes, it's very hard to do all of these things really well. It's also just a matter of like focus and resources for microsoft.

I don't know that adding one more tiny piece of software makes you a company more likely to sign up for IT. Microsoft is gonna ep doing that stuff, but at some point, like office is pretty sticky already. And I think for microsoft to spend the resources in time and energy to add more stuff is actually a pretty big bet for that company to make.

Is why teams were such a big deal, right, that microsoft saw all of the sun pandemic starts. The idea of, I think, video chat in particular, was like an existent al shift in how we communicate at work. IT had the potential to just like destroy outlook and become the center of everything.

And zoom immediately set out to build a whole office sweet, right? That was the thing zoom was going to do. They were like, we're going to make video into everything.

We're going to start doing yoga classes or resume, but we're also gonna build like zoom male and zoom talks. And that became the center of how people worked in microsoft. Cos, oh god, maybe that is gonna be the center of how people work and build teams and crushed IT. Because ultimately, the free thing usually wins.

We need to take another quick break. We will get back.

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And back with verge at the large day, appears to discussing the next big thing in enterprise software. And if IT will be as big of a change, is software eating the world glass turn I want to talk about? And i'm very curious if you've actually seen any features here that work or are valuable.

I already know you're about to ask.

It's obviously so the dream here mentioned zoom the c of zoom amErica on is on the show and he his dream is that will make an A I agent out of you with everything zoom knows out of you and your AI agent. Potentially thousands of them will go off and have meetings in nearly half while you sit on the beach. I want to be a hundred percent clear.

This is a real thing, he said on the show. This is the thing he wants to go. I don't know about that.

This is gentle of of an evaluation of that idea, as I can give IT somewhere underneath that. I work at a company where a lot of people have made a lot of decisions. I don't know what those decisions are.

There might be some wiki in some horrible piece of enterprise wiki software that don't really have to access. And when I just acting up and I just whatever not going to do IT, this slider was too busy. I have no idea what is going to made here.

I'm afraid to see a lot wrong thing, uh, all this is a mess. I'm just going to ask some all knowing enterprise AI, hey, what's our history of sales in this region and who is our biggest client? And IT will spin through all the company's data and answer the question and tell me how to make the next move. That's the dream. Is any that reality yet?

Ah no, I think it's IT is plausible in a way that I find a lot of AI stuff really implausible because IT in a real way, most of the data that you need exists right, that companies have that data somewhere IT IT is IT is written company hand box get written down. These things are are placed somewhere. The problem is that they are in thousands of places, right? Again, I I was just rereading this octave thing ahead of a recording here.

And the average company in the united states pays for, I think I was a hundred and ten different pieces of enterprise software. That's too many. And what that means is if you want to find a thing, god help you, right? Like where do you even start? And so what you've seen, I think, is the beginning of what's about to be another big rebundling as a result of that because that thing you just describe super enticing.

There are studies everywhere that say we spend a huge amount of our time at work just looking for stuff, uh, and that actually easy access to information would be like the greatest productivity enabled in modern history. And the idea that I could just say what is our sales history with them or like who's the contact over there and get that stuff quickly, incredible. And so every company is after that's right, like drop box, build this thing, dash that searches across our stuff and different apps.

You see companies like notion, which are trying to do more and more stuff. They're building out new features just in service of getting all that information inside of the APP so that you can create with A I microsoft is doing IT with copilot. Google is doing IT with german.

I like for the first time in a while, being the bundle is more valuable than the sum of its parts in a way that isn't just sort of purely about like contract values and it's easier to have one relationship instead of several. Now like your products can all be Better because you control more of them. And I think what we're going to see as a result is this rush back to I don't want to have fifty best in class apps that don't talk to each other.

I want to have six things that do all fifty of those things, even if they are not as good, but because stitching them all together makes them more value. To me. One of the things that A I is actually good at is summize ation, right? You can say things like not just summarized this email for me, you, but like in in slack AI the thing they're trying to build, as you should just be able to build what happened today.

And I will be able to tell you, like here, the things people are talking about, here's the file everybody was sharing around that is meaningful and goes a long way towards makings lack, not like a hell hole of online communication. So this stuff is coming, and I think it's gonna a be really powerful, but IT only works if it's all everywhere because this is one of the things that like if you solved seventy percent of my problem, you've solved none of my problem. And getting there is gonna take a minute. But I think the the push towards that has already started in a pretty big way.

How to square that with, hey, there's a big push to run more software locally. Hey, people are very cognizant of the amount of data they are giving up to essentially zed AI providers or centralized clb providers. Hey, i'm just generally uncomfortable with my law practice for my medical practice having all of its data taken up and in the cloud, where am no longer control of my client data, of my patient data.

I'm hearing a lot of excitement from companies about open source models. I think right now, you look at the open a eyes in the anthropos of the world and even like what google is doing, a geri, again, we're in this phase of everything is humongous and in the cloud. But eventually, like these models will run on your device.

They'll be able to run locally on your own instance. Like what I don't think is going back is I think A U S. In azure and google cloud going to be fine. I think like on prem servers are not coming back, but at least you're gone to be able to exert some control inside of that, right? So like the the A I systems will be something run by your company, inside of your company, more overtime than they currently are.

And I think IT sort of drives with that whole idea of like I want to have all the conveniences of all of my stuff being online and accessible everywhere and sort of functionally managed by somebody else. But I also want that control, that this data is mine. I know where it's going, I know how it's being used and I know where to find IT. And that baLance has been really hard to strike over the years. But I think especially as these A I models from meta with lama and others get Better and faster and especially like cheaper and simpler and more local, like my company approved laptop is going to be more important than never.

The big idea that we start talking about is the generation quote software is in the world, all these businesses are software businesses or they are going to Operate on software that is very clearly happened. Most will shop network. They get handed a iphone that runs the enter Price software.

The you handed a laptop that runs under Price software, the matter who you are, it's all just happening. It's all just happening inside a software. And then some other actually what happened somewhere else. I I think we can agree for the purposes of this second up. So that is almost complete like that transition is complete in the workforce is the next turn. A I that that's actually gonna redefine how we do work because the A I companies are absolutely betting they can pay off all this investment with that level of change in turn over an upgrade investment. And not only of the .

A I companies betting on IT. Like how many cars do you think you've had on this show this year who have not mentioned that I once I honestly, I would be shock if it's more than one who isn't out here talking about A I because again, a you like have to have a strategy or everybody thinks you an old fusty company nobody cares about anymore in your board fires you and that the whole thing, but also, again, the promise is so huge, right?

The idea that A I can remove all out of the busy work that we have to do if you turn making A A deck out of an excel, spread gy into just a command to an A, I like that, a measurable productivity increase in the world. And the the same thing with the finding of the information and even some of the general stuff that start to happen, like if that stuff works, and that is a bit like I cannot emphasize the if enough there, it's not when, it's if in a very real way. But if that self all works, IT sincerely changes the way we do just about everything.

And IT means you and I, we probably won't go to the beach more often, but we get to spend more of our time doing things that are like interesting and rewarding and valuable, rather than busy work, like I spent a lot of my time doing busy work. Uh, you don't because you just have people put print outs on your desk for you, the circle things bull dream life is busy work. And if we can get rid of that, there are all kinds of really complicated societal implications that because, Frankly, a lot of people's job is busy work, and a lot of people do busy work for a living. But the question of, what could this mean if IT hits, if IT works, it's just too big for anybody did not try.

And that how is old? This will make your company more productively as well. Let digital god make a bunch of the dex for you. yeah.

The alternative is this is going to make you more productive ves. You can fire a half your staff. And like a lot of these companies don't want to say that even though that is both what are buying and what they are selling is I can fire a bunch of people and replace with this software.

I think in the in the near term, the actual real thing that's onna happen is it's just gonna tomake a bunch of work, right? Like I think what we're looking at of something much closer to the advent of computers, when all of a sudden, instead of sitting at my desk, writing out, spread, cheat by hand, I could just sit there and type one in. When I changed the number, the other numbers were changed.

Huge societal revolution probably cost a lot of jobs, but was not the like. Be all and end all of society forever, right? I think we're much more at that era. Now we're all of a sudden we we are about to have this real sort of step change in what technology let us do very quickly.

And then the question is, what are we going to do with the time that suddenly appears as a result? And with computers, IT was we're going to make ourselves busy or talking to each other and looking at tiktok. What will be with A I I think .

we're interest David are gonna every vaccine. Thanks much care. Thank you. I like think David for take time joined to code and thank you for listening.

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