TITLE: 'Send' Is The Universal Verb
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 21, 2015 3:02 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
In the mid-1980s, Ray Ozzie left IBM with the idea of creating
an all-in-one software platform for business collaboration,
based on his experience using the group messaging system in
the seminal computer-assisted instruction system
Plato.
Ozzie's idea eventually became
Lotus Notes.
This platform lives on today in an IBM product, but it never
had the effect that Ozzie envisioned for it.
In
Office, Messaging, and Verbs,
Benedict Evans tells us that Ozzie's idea is alive and well and
finally taking over the world -- in the form of Facebook:
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.
"Office, Messaging, and Verbs" is an engaging essay about how
collaborative work and the tools we use to do it co-evolve,
changing each other in turn. You need a keyboard to do the
task at hand... But is the task at hand your job, or is it
merely the way you do your job today? The answer depends on
where you are on the arc of evolution.
Alas, most days I need to create or consume a spreadsheet or
two. Spreadsheets are not my job, but they are way people
in universities and most other corporate entities do too many
of their jobs these days. So, like Jack Lemmon in The
Apartment, I compute my cell's function and pass it along
to the next person in line.
I'm ready for us to evolve further down the curve.
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Note: I added the Oxford comma to Evans's original title. I
never apologize for inserting an Oxford comma.
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