I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.
That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.
It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.
Yeah. Technically I’m not talking about Microsoft, as their primary product is the OS and they are not purely Internet-based. IBM, of course, is much older than that and also has some Internet products, as does every software company.
In my statement “Internet company” means a company whose only product is SaaS on the Internet; i.e. someone who, if they went away, their product would disappear with them.
Google is actually the sine qua non of what I’m talking about. I’ll concede that it’s possible Google as a corporate entity will still exist in 2048 (it was founded in 1998). But Google has undergone such a drastic and dystopian management change that it’s almost not even the same company now–
–but that isn’t relevant to what I’m actually talking about, which is the products. The proposition that Slack logs would still be around 50 years from now was what catalyzed my quip. Google kills everything it makes, usually quickly. Will we be able to look at Google Reader logs in 2048? Or–even closer to the target–Google Wave logs? Google Podcasts? Google Stadia? (I could go on.)
At the end of the day it was just a quip, but I fully expect the SaaS companies you currently think of as indestructible titans to be on the dustheap of history in 20 years, let alone 50.
I mean, unironically, yeah.
It’s not even that we need to go back to email. The problem isn’t moving on from outdated forms of communication, it’s that the technology being pushed as a replacement for it is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Which is to say nothing of the fact that all of these new platforms are proprietary, walled off, and in some cases don’t make controlling the data easy if you’re not hosting it (and their searches are trash).
all of these new platforms are proprietary, walled off, and in some cases don’t make controlling the data easy if you’re not hosting it
You’ve just discovered their business case. Almost all new business es these days specialize in insinuating themselves into an existing process in order to co-opt it and charge rents.
It’s not Slack’s fault. It is a good platform for one-off messages. Need a useless bureaucratic form signed? Slack. Need your boss to okay the afternoon off? Slack. Need to ask your lead programmer which data structure you should use and why they’re set up that way? Sounds like the answer should be put in a wiki page, not slack.
All workflows are small components of a larger workplace. Emails also suck for a lot of things. They probably wouldn’t have worked in this case, memos are the logical upgrade from emails where you want to make sure everyone receives it and the topic is not up for further discussion.
memos are the logical upgrade from emails where you want to make sure everyone receives it
uh, email is memos? email is so memos that ibm’s proprietary email management solution Lotus Notes calls the transaction “create memo” where outlook calls it “new message”.
and the topic is not up for further discussion.
bit rude, imo.
fossilesque
FlatFootFox
nxdefiant
Something Burger 🍔
I Cast Fist
Noble Shift