David Pierce
Appearances
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And you're seeing the same from a company like Salesforce, which bought Slack so that you spend more time in the Salesforce 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. Meet is better. Teams is better. People still really like Zoom. And I don't think that's changing anytime soon.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Okay, I'm going to say this, and I should preface by saying I have very little quantitative evidence for it, but it is starting to be a thing I hear more and more in talking to folks who make this stuff. I think it's coming back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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 easier to manage in so many ways, right? It's easier to understand who has it where. It's easier to provision on different people's computers. It's easier to manage. You know where your data is. Like from a corporate management standpoint,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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 a safer, saner, simpler place for your data, I don't think feels true to people in the way that it once did.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And all of that, notwithstanding questions about, is my stuff being trained for AI purposes? Do I want the AI stuff that is coming to all of these things? I think... you're starting to see this shift towards what some people in this industry call local first software.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And basically it's this huge sort of re-architecting 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 together. That file can live on my computer 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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 stuff that works offline, which, like, God help you if you're on a plane or in bad Wi-Fi or anything. Like, it's so hard to do anything online. without the internet now. And I think people notice that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And we're coming back to this idea of like, I want something that feels fast, which means it 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 collaborative thing, we get the cloud access, we get the cross-platform stuff.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's manageable by your organization, but But it has the same feeling of like, I can just open a thing on my computer and it works.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
You could sort of argue that we skipped the correct middle step there, right? We're like, okay, doing the thing where I email you a file that says David presentation one, and then you email it back and it says David presentation two, and then final, final, final dot PPT. Like that sucks. We can all agree that that is bad.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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 own any of your data? And that we sort of left a good middle ground out there. And I think I would not... bet everything that it's going to win.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
But I think there's going to be a push back towards the idea of like local on device, but still useful and in sync and collaborative stuff coming back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I'm back with Verge Editor-at-Large, David Pierce, talking about the evolution of workplace software.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I was hoping nobody would notice.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Ironically, I hosted the show before I was a guest on the show. I did a thing with Sean Hollister a while ago when you were off, you know, gallivanting somewhere. But now I get to be here talking to you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Yeah, I think one of my great theories about Slack is that everybody uses Slack wrong. Like everybody uses Slack wrong. And I think if you rewind all the way back to that initial launch of Slack, Stuart Butterfield wrote this really great blog post. It's called something like we don't sell saddles here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And he basically outlines like the whole vision for what Slack is going for and makes the argument that the biggest problem is that most people don't understand what they need Slack for. And so Slack's 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
If you really want to boil it down, the idea behind Slack was not to be a chat app. It was to just be a place to put all your stuff. And all your stuff is communication, it's 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's accessible, you could build something really powerful.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Super cool idea has nothing to do with what Slack is and how it's used, right? We use Slack as an email replacement, right? I think Stuart was serious when he said they weren't trying to kill email. They were trying to like subsume it inside of a different system, but they were always going to be like, look, if you want to send email to talk to each other, that's fine.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
But like when you need to share files, do it in Slack. I think that is much closer to what Slack wanted to be than what it has become. And what it became is this awful system engagement bait app that we all spend way too much time in and never actually get any work done inside of.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's millennials and it's text boxes. There's this long sort of mythological story about Kinja, which was the old CMS that they used to run at Gawker.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And I have no idea if this is true, but it is a story I heard that I spiritually completely believe, which is that they ran an experiment at Gawker where if they changed the size of the default text box in Kinja, it would change how long people wrote. If you give people a lot of space, make the text box big, They're gonna write a lot in it. You fill the thing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
If you make it one line, people are gonna write one line and hit enter, right? Slack made it one line. It looks like a thing where you would send text messages. It doesn't look like an email inbox. You don't have subjects. You don't have two lines. You don't have a thing for a signature. Like, can you imagine if you had a signature at the bottom of every Slack message? You'd look like a lunatic.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And it was a bunch of millennials who came into the workforce and are used to the type of thought, press enter, type another thought, press enter, type another thought, press enter. If you get the text that is two paragraphs from somebody, either somebody died or you're being broken up with.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And instead, we just trained everyone to talk in work like they talk to their friends in text. And culturally, I think that is really interesting and complicated, but it immediately broke that paradigm that you're talking about, which is Slack even has always said that Slack uses Slack in a much more considered way. People write much longer things.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's designed less for like minute to minute updates of what you're doing all day and more for like a, here's what I accomplished during the day. Again, so that someone can go find it later. You're not expected at Slack to be in lots of rooms. There is a norm that if you need somebody, you mention them. And Slack set up all these rules, but didn't bake any of it into the product.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
They built a product that looks like text messaging. And so people used it like text messaging. And Slack has now spent the last decade being like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's all about rules. You have to set up norms. You have to teach each other how to use the app. And it's like, no, stop building me a text messaging app.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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 your company communicates when you join a company. That stuff matters. And we just like hand people Slack and they're like, we use Slack.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And that's as much as you get. Like, do you know how to use Slack? It's like, sure. But I don't know how to use Slack the way that you use Slack, right? And that stuff matters a lot. I talked to this woman, Laura Martin, who is like Google's productivity guru. And one of the things she recommends to everybody is like, just muck around in the settings.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Just go spend 10 minutes clicking all the buttons 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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 going to go too far and swing the pendulum back? Because so far there's really no evidence that we're going to, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
There are a lot of people who complain that everything is moving too fast and we're all too attached to these messaging systems and we can't keep up with everything and it's making us crazy and we all spend time in Slack instead of actually doing our jobs. And there's just no indication that that's going back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
You could actually make the case that email represents a much saner, more functional way to run a business than inside of Slack. But like, do you want to go back to email? I don't really 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And either we're going to 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 thing Slack is very good at is making itself look really engaged.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And when it looks lively all the time, which makes managers and bosses feel like things are happening and that feels good. Whereas if you don't hear from anybody for eight hours, you're like, is everybody working? What's everybody doing?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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 them because it still feels productive, even though I don't have to do anything as constantly rethinking the way that I do everything, which again, you could argue that's not productive at all.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's one really good reason to keep building your bundle, right? 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't 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 people who actually pay for this stuff happy
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
You either need to be like vastly better. Like I think even being slightly better doesn't get you 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 really good example is in the expenses world.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I wouldn't swear to this, but I think it's true that Expensify was the first company to really do a good job of letting you take a picture of a receipt and turn it into an expense and upload it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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 relevant stuff and turn it into expense I think it was Expensify who did it I don't know who it was for sure whoever it was congratulations you you win and they did and that like Expensify 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
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
middle tier products you encounter but don't really care about all that much. There's just not that much surface area to do that. But then the stuff that people use every day, the switching cost is so much higher because it's so much more entrenched. Trying to get someone to stop using an app that they hate but have used for 10 years is so, so hard.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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 they'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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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. Come switch to our software. And people are like,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I mean, to some extent, they have run away with this, right? I'm convinced that Excel is the single sickiest piece of software on earth. You see it and hear it all the time that... Like the companies I was 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 presentation software.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
You can build good document editing. No one can beat Excel. It is just not possible. And who pays for this stuff is the people who use Excel all day. Yeah. 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 focus and resources.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
For Microsoft, I don't know that adding one more tiny piece of software makes your company more likely to sign up for it. Microsoft is going to keep doing that stuff. But at some point, Office is pretty sticky already. And I think for Microsoft to spend the resources and time and energy to add more stuff is actually a pretty... big bet for that company to make.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's probably not, but I, I have spent probably more time thinking about how I do stuff than than almost anyone I know. I don't know if it's useful. I don't know if it helps. I end up just back in the same apps 400 different times a year, but it is a thing I have spent way too much time and energy on over the years.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's why teams was such a big deal, right? That Microsoft saw all of a sudden pandemic starts. The idea of, I think video chat in particular was like an existential 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 sets out to build a whole office suite, right? That was the thing zoom was going to do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
They were like, we're going to make video into everything. We're going to start doing yoga classes over zoom, but we're also going to build like Zoom mail and Zoom docs. And that became the center of how people worked. And Microsoft goes, oh God, maybe that is going to be the center of how people work and built teams and crushed it because ultimately the free thing usually wins.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Uh, no, I think it's, it is plausible in a way that I find a lot of AI stuff really implausible. Because in a real way, most of the data that you need exists, right? Like companies have that data somewhere. It is written. Company handbooks get written down. These things are placed somewhere. The problem is that they are in thousands of places, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Again, I was just rereading this Okta thing ahead of our recording here. And the average company in the United States pays for, I think it was 110 different pieces of enterprise software. That's too many. And what it means is if you want to find a thing, God help you. Like, where do you even start?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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 described is super enticing. There are studies everywhere that say we spend a huge amount of our time at work just looking for stuff. And that actually easy access to information would be like the greatest productivity enabler in modern history. And
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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 this, right? Like Dropbox built this thing dash that searches across all your stuff and all your different apps. You see companies like notion, which are trying to do more and more stuff.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
They're building out new features just in service of getting all that information inside of the app. so that you can query it with AI. Microsoft is doing it with Copilot. Google is doing it with Gemini.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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 contract values and it's easier to have one relationship instead of several. Now, your products can all be better because you control more of them.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And I think what we're going to see as a result is this rush back to, I don't want to have 50 best in class apps that don't talk to each other. I want to have six things that do all 50 of those things, even if they're not as good, but because stitching them all together makes them more valuable to me. one of the things that AI is actually good at is summarization, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
So you can say things like, not just summarize this email for me, but like in Slack's AI, the thing they're trying to build is you should just be able to be like, what happened today? And it'll be able to tell you like, here are the things people were talking about. Here's the file everybody was sharing around.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Like that stuff is meaningful and goes a long way towards making Slack not like a hell hole of one line communication. So this stuff is coming and I think it's gonna be really powerful. But it only works if it's all everywhere, because this is one of those things that if you solve 70% of my problem, you've solved none of my problem. And getting there is going to take a minute.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
But I think the push towards that has already started in a pretty big way.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I'm hearing a lot of excitement from companies about open source models. I think right now you look at the open AIs and the anthropics of the world, and even like what Google is doing with Gemini. And 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Like what I don't think is going back is I think AWS and Azure and Google Cloud are gonna be fine. I think like on-prem servers are not coming back, but at least you're gonna be able to exert some control inside of that, right? So like the AI systems will be something run by your company inside of your company, more over time than they currently are.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And I think it sort of jives 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And that balance has been really hard to strike over the years. But I think especially as these AI 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 ever.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Yeah. And not only are the AI companies betting on it, like how many CEOs do you think you've had on this show this year who have not mentioned AI once? I honestly, I would be shocked if it's more than one who isn't out here talking about AI.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Because again, A, you like have to have a strategy or everybody thinks you're an old fusty company that nobody cares about anymore and your board fires you and that's a whole thing. Yeah. But also, again, the promise is so huge, right? The idea that AI can remove a lot of the busy work that we have to do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
If you turn making a deck out of an Excel spreadsheet into just a command to an AI, like, that's a measurable productivity increase in the world. And the same thing with the finding of the information and even some of the generative stuff that's starting to happen, like... If that stuff works, and that is a bit, like I cannot emphasize the if enough there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's not when, it's if in a very real way. But if that stuff 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 spend a lot of my time doing busy work.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
You don't because you just have people put printouts on your desk for you to circle things on. But like life is busy work. And if we can get rid of that, there are all kinds of really complicated societal implications to that because frankly, a lot of people's job is busy work and a lot of people do busy work for a living.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
But the question of what could this mean if it hits, if it works, it's just too big for anybody to not try.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Yeah. The alternative is this is going to make you more productive so you can fire half your staff. And like a lot of these companies don't want to say that even though that is both what they're buying and what they're selling is I can fire a bunch of people and replace them with this software.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I think in the near term, the actual real thing that's going to happen is it's just going to automate away a bunch of work, right? Like, I think what we're looking at is something much closer to the advent of computers when all of a sudden, instead of sitting at my desk writing out spreadsheets by hand, I could just sit there and
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
type one, and when I changed the number, the other numbers would change. 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, where all of a sudden we are about to have this real sort of step change in what technology lets us do very quickly.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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 busier talking to each other and looking at TikTok. What it will be with AI, I think, remains to be seen.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Support for this episode comes from AWS. With the power of AWS Generative AI, teams can get relevant, fast answers to pressing questions and use data to drive real results. Power your business and generate real impact with the most experienced cloud.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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 going to happen with AI, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Like it wasn't that long ago that everybody was like, oh, because of the industrial revolution and then computers, we won't have to work 40 hours a week anymore. We're all gonna be so efficient with this new technology that we're just gonna work eight hours a week and get the same amount done. Whoops, that didn't happen. But I think that transition is exactly right.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And I think the thing that comes after accountants using Excel is the question.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I think your categorization is almost right. I think I would shift the Microsoft office and Google workspace more into the productivity tool thing. I think the way I've come to see it basically is like there's software you use every day. There's the software you hope you never have to use. And then there's the software you definitely never have to use.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And the software you definitely never have to use is like the stuff that runs the robots, right? There's like a person at your company whose job it is to use that software and no one else will ever touch it. 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And most people should never once in their lives have to encounter compliance software. So that's one side of it. All the way at the other side, you have the productivity tools, right? So that's like the Google docs and Gmail, Microsoft word and Excel and the stuff that people do their jobs inside of.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And then in the middle, there's all the sort of messy stuff that everybody hates the most, like the HR software and the travel booking software and the way to set up IT 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 middle.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And people hate the software the most, I think in the middle, because it's not the stuff you use every day. So you don't build systems around it. You don't learn the ins and outs of it. You just encounter performance management software four times a year, and you are required to do it, but you don't have to do it long enough to actually care about it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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 at varying levels of invisible to how most people actually want to do their jobs all the time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Yeah. It feels like. Every day we get further from the light of printed things on paper.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Well, and I think if everybody worked this way, it would be great, is the great truism 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 and process and tool for getting things done is borderline impossible.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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. Seriously. And this is like a non-crazy way to build software that there is literally only one way to use it. It's not that there's even right or wrong ways.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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, the much more enticing and popular path, but also the path to ruin, is you try to be everything to everyone all the time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And you say, okay, your boss wants to use this piece of software and they wanna use it this way. That's insane, 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 gonna give you is a million other buttons and knobs to press and twist so that maybe you'll find the thing that you like.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And the hope is you can build this sort of great denominator software across everything. And that's how you build Microsoft Word. And eventually it gets away from you, right? You build the thing that does everything to everybody. And then all of a sudden it becomes this like overwhelming mess of a piece of software and it all falls apart. but those are your only two moves.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And so like, I've really, I've come to feel for these companies over time because you have IT managers who buy a lot of the software, who want one thing. You have bosses who demand a lot of the software, who want something completely different.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And then you have the people who actually have to use this software all day, every day, who are having this, A, foisted upon them and B, dictated to them how they have to use it. I don't know that it's 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's a strange overlap right now. Actually, there was a long period of time where the bundlers were winning. And you would start, like you said, with one need. And you would say, okay, if you're MailChimp, we're going to make it really easy for you to email a lot of people. And then...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
You see the thing that people leave MailChimp for during their day and you're like, well, we could just build that thing. We can build better CRM software so that you don't have to go elsewhere to make the stuff in order to send it to your emails. And then you just sort of slowly build out from there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And that stuff is starting 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 bundling 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.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's bundling and unbundling. 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 was at home. Everybody had new software needs and everybody needed them like tomorrow. And so everybody went like literally tomorrow.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It was 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 a new way to do collaborative design. We need a new way to do video calls. And we can't wait for someone else to attach it to the contract that we have. We're just going to go sign up for the thing that everybody likes that's the best.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
That's why Zoom got huge, even though other video tools existed, right? That's why things like Figma started to take off, because people just needed these new workflows. And so there was this massive rush towards these so-called best-of-breed things, and Then what obviously started to happen is the big companies started to tack that stuff on Microsoft builds teams, Google invests in meat.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And so zoom becomes less competitive in its own way. But what's wild to me is the, this company Okta, which does basically like log in and a bunch of other stuff, like you're talking about, they started as a way to log into services. And now there's like a whole giant backend authentication stuff that they do. Uh, they do this really good serve way called businesses at work every year. And.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
The wildest thing in, I believe it was the 2023 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 Zoom. And so we're in this place where...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
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.