Analysis – Three 'Eras' of Workplace Technology
The Past, Present and Future of Workplace Technology.
The literal definition of an era is; “a long and distinct period of history with a particular feature or characteristic”. If we replace the word ‘feature’ or ‘characteristic’ with innovation, we can probably understand the true meaning in a better way, at least when it comes to technology. With workplace productivity and the technology associated with it, I believe there are two primary areas of innovation. UX innovation  - This is by providing a better way for a person to do their own work.  This generally includes ease of use, performance, look and feel; anything related to UX basically.Collaboration innovation - This is providing a better way to communicate & collaborate between a team. This can help a team to work together more effectively. If I am able to exchange my thoughts & my work more effectively with the team; the overall impact is huge.The past, the present and the future all have seen and will see one or other above innovation and if one wants to account and go back as early as the advent of computers; we should discuss the pre past or the 0ᵗʰ era too.  The chart below shows the innovation progress over time in these different eras.We discuss below each era in detail and the reasoning behind this chart. The 0ᵗʰ era is mostly the pre-internet era. Applications like MS word, MS Excel, Outlook etc introduced a new way to workplace, digitizing the way we do work. Most of the innovation though, was focused on improving the setup and UX of these applications or trying to make it functional. Back in 1990 installing Office was an involved process. Office version 1 for Windows used a graphical installer for the initial phases of setup, but each app required installation separately and used a DOS-based interface. Each application also required a little knowledge of paths and commands for placing the application files on disk. (Source)This initial struggle of software at workplace considerably improved over time. Collaboration was still painful though. To get feedback from a team member, the file had to be transferred back and forth. Email was the game changer for collaboration but in hindsight it kind of pales in comparison.The 1ˢᵗ era saw the emergence of cloud and SaaS based services. The cloud made a big difference mostly with collaboration & partly with the UX. Tools like GSuite, Office 365 made it easier for people to work over the web which provided several advantages. If you see the chart above, incremental innovation happened on both the fronts. UX was drastically improved since it made easier for a team in terms of setup, on-boarding, updates and provisioning. Plus, SaaS bought with it other set of advantages to a company which I won’t go into details here¹.Collaboration became lot easier too, primarily because of the omnipresence of the web. You could find any application or tool on the internet with a link. No setup, no additional hardware; just a link. With this, instead of sending individual files back and forth, what you need is just there. Anyone (who is allowed) could see the info,  and make changes immediately. That's why collaboration innovation was much more pronounced in this era. The 2ⁿᵈ era which is still being played out in front of us, is focused aggressively towards collaboration.  You see messaging applications becoming central to workplace productivity. Applications like Slack, Microsoft Teams give more emphasis to how teams communicate with each other and how do you make it more easy to do everything in a single application.  The latter part is what is more interesting. Even though, in the 1st era, cloudification improved a lot of things; but you still had different tools to manage and keep track of (sheets, CRM, slides, docs, email, chat etc). Slack was successful in improving this experience. You could now integrate these applications to your virtual messaging team space and keep track there itself. As noted by Ben Thompsan in Stratechery -Slack was designed from the ground up to integrate with external software systems. Slack provides an easy way for users to share and aggregate information from other software, take action on notifications, and advance workflows in a multitude of third-party applications, over 1,500 of which are listed in the Slack App Directory. Further, Slack’s platform capabilities extend beyond integrations with third-party applications and allow for easy integrations with an organization’s internally-developed software.  (Source)Although there are limits to it²; but it still provided a significant cut down to the number of times you have to visit different applications. Messaging becomes the place for you to interact with your team and get things done more easily.2ⁿᵈ era was all about innovation in collaboration. But the applications itself more or less were tied to the old way of doing things with the added benefit of easy onboarding & ability to tie it together with apps like Slack.  What you still see though, is the old status quo of standalone applications providing you the ability to do one specialized thing only.  For e.g to write documents you need a word processor, for preparing presentations you need slides or power point, for task management an application like JIRA etc. Do we need to rethink this model? The answer lies in some of the upcoming products that are challenging this assumption. We take a closer look at some of them.Rethinking spreadsheetA product like Smartsheet, Tables, Lists or Airtable (which was valued at $2-3 billion dollars in the last funding round) rethinks the way we use a tool like spreadsheet and many other project management or organization kind of tools. A statement from this article about Airtable. While Liu saw a clear opportunity to redefine what spreadsheets could be, he didn’t want to just make a better spreadsheet. Liu realized that he could create an entirely new type of product that empowered users to create what were essentially simple applications and in a way that many users would find familiar and intuitive. Airtable is rethinking the fundamental reason people use tool like sheets, JIRA and enable people to create their own mini applications at workplace. Rethinking “Office Suite”Microsoft’s office suite has always followed this very fixed model of providing different types of applications ever since it was launched; MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint etc.  Notion and Microsoft’s own fluid framework (recently introduced)  try to challenge this mindset.  Notion combines the features of a note-taking app, a task-management app and a spreadsheet tool the way that Steve Jobs combined an iPod, a cellphone and a web browser into the iPhone: All these tools work together to create something more than its parts.When you open a new page in the app, you’re really creating a blank grid onto which you can place and arrange just about anything. The app’s basic element is the block, which could be a paragraph of text, a bulleted list, a table, an image, a code snippet, a YouTube video, a PDF and more. (Source)Microsoft is creating a new kind of Office document. Instead of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, the company has created Lego blocks of Office content that live on the web. The tables, graphs, and lists that you typically find in Office documents are transforming into living, collaborative modules that exist outside of traditional documents. Microsoft calls its Lego blocks Fluid components, and they can be edited in real time by anyone in any app. The idea is that you could create things like a table without having to switch to multiple apps to get it done, and the table will persist on the web like a Lego block, free for anyone to use and edit. (Source)Both of these above innovations are enabling legofication of workplace applications. Providing building blocks for people to customize or create applications on their own.  This is certainly a major leap when it comes to UX innovation in workplace tech. Also, I believe it can provide a major boost to collaboration innovation as well. Note what Microsoft mentioned as part of their fluid framework and also check the attached image.The tables, graphs, and lists that you typically find in Office documents are transforming into living, collaborative modules that exist outside of traditional documents.This allows you to basically share individual blocks or sub parts of your document and collaboratively work on it.  This could be a game changer. What you currently have is partial integration² of different tools in your messaging application like Slack.  It feels like duct taping (a very strong and effective duct taping) different things together in order to collaborate. But Fluid framework or Notion will enable people to just work out of their messaging application. You can share with a team a sub section with your team; the section that  That’s why we should see a substantial innovation in collaboration and the overall innovation increase could be pretty steep as shown by 3rd era point in the chart above.We are very early though in this era and we should see the innovation happen across different kind of tools; not just sheets or office suite. We should also see companies like Google coming forward with more innovative products. As I noted in my article about Google’s communication products. The other great thing about Chat is that, Google can integrate it's other GSuite products like Drive, Documents, Sheets all within the Chat.Google should also double down and release improved versions of their Google GSuite Apps & a way to better integrate their products with their messaging solutions. The era should see the end of the old Office Suite like paradigm though and introduction of more customized all in one apps. The most interesting part though is how remote work adoption is forcing companies to adopt new ways of doing things (if Slack can be counted as relatively new). The innovation speed will accelerate because of this adoption, helping the third era emerge more swiftly.With SaaS, the company doesn’t have to pay for hardware, the associated maintenance fees, keep a separate IT team or worry about scalability issues. https://setatime.co/blog/what-is-software-as-a-service-saas-simplified/Slack plugins provide a partial integration with 3rd party apps; basically an API like interaction. For e.g  The sheet chat plugin allows you to add new rows, get notified about updated data of your sheet document into Slack. But you can’t really edit sub parts of the documents in Slack itself.