We Are in the Middle of a Wave of Interesting New Productivity Software Startups (ben-evans.com) 45
VC fund A16z's Benedict Evans writes: We are in the middle of a wave of interesting new productivity software startups -- there are dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of collaboration, chat or information-sharing. All of these things are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email and file shares. Instead of a flat grid of cells, a dumb list of files, and a dumb list of little text files (which is what email really is), we get some kind of richer canvas that mixes all of these together in ways that are native to the web and collaboration. Then, we have another new wave of productivity company that addresses a particular profession and bundles all of the tasks that were spread across spreadsheets, email and file shares into some new structured flow.
[...] A few years ago a consultant told me that for half of their jobs they told people using Excel to use a database, and for the other half they told people using a database to use Excel. There's clearly a point in the life of any company where you should move from the list you made in a spreadsheet to the richer tools you can make in coolproductivityapp.io. But when that tool is managing a thousand people, you might want to move it into a dedicated service. After all, even Craigslist started as an actual email list and ended up moving to a database. But then, at a certain point, if that task is specific to your company and central to what you do, you might well end up unbundling Salesforce or SAP or whatever that vertical is and go back to the beginning. Of course, this is the cycle of life of enterprise software. IBM mainframes bundled the adding machines you see Jack Lemmon using below, and also bundled up filing cabinets and telephones. SAP unbundled IBM. But I'd suggest there are two specific sets of things that are happening now.
First, every application category is getting rebuilt as a web application, allowing continuous development, deployment, version tracking and collaboration. As Frame.io (video!) and OnShape (3D CAD!) show, there's almost no native PC application that can't be rebuilt as a web app. In parallel, everything now has to be native to collaboration, and so the model of a binary file saved to a file share will generally go away over time (this could be done with a native PC app, but in practice generally won't be). So, we have some generational changes, and that also tends to create new companies. But second, and much more important -- everyone is online now. The reason we're looking at nursing or truck drivers or oil workers is that an entire generation now grew up after the web, and grew up with smartphones, and assumes without question that every part of their life can be done with a smartphone. In 1999 hiring 'roughnecks' in a mobile app would have sounded absurd -- now it sounds absurd if you're not. And that means that a lot of tasks will get shifted into software that were never really in software at all before.
[...] A few years ago a consultant told me that for half of their jobs they told people using Excel to use a database, and for the other half they told people using a database to use Excel. There's clearly a point in the life of any company where you should move from the list you made in a spreadsheet to the richer tools you can make in coolproductivityapp.io. But when that tool is managing a thousand people, you might want to move it into a dedicated service. After all, even Craigslist started as an actual email list and ended up moving to a database. But then, at a certain point, if that task is specific to your company and central to what you do, you might well end up unbundling Salesforce or SAP or whatever that vertical is and go back to the beginning. Of course, this is the cycle of life of enterprise software. IBM mainframes bundled the adding machines you see Jack Lemmon using below, and also bundled up filing cabinets and telephones. SAP unbundled IBM. But I'd suggest there are two specific sets of things that are happening now.
First, every application category is getting rebuilt as a web application, allowing continuous development, deployment, version tracking and collaboration. As Frame.io (video!) and OnShape (3D CAD!) show, there's almost no native PC application that can't be rebuilt as a web app. In parallel, everything now has to be native to collaboration, and so the model of a binary file saved to a file share will generally go away over time (this could be done with a native PC app, but in practice generally won't be). So, we have some generational changes, and that also tends to create new companies. But second, and much more important -- everyone is online now. The reason we're looking at nursing or truck drivers or oil workers is that an entire generation now grew up after the web, and grew up with smartphones, and assumes without question that every part of their life can be done with a smartphone. In 1999 hiring 'roughnecks' in a mobile app would have sounded absurd -- now it sounds absurd if you're not. And that means that a lot of tasks will get shifted into software that were never really in software at all before.
Unintended consequences (Score:3)
"In 1999 hiring 'roughnecks' in a mobile app would have sounded absurd -- now it sounds absurd if you're not."
Because we're trained by economic factors to obsessively remove all "friction".
But this just ends at commodification of everything, and a growing inability to deal with people outside of seeing them as commodities. "Friction" is where humanity happens.
Boot Stamping on a Human Face Forever (Score:1)
No files, only access through proprietary tools and walled gardens.
That way lies lock-in.
mashing (X) to doubt (Score:1)
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It's why much of the older, more experienced crowd got out of web dev as soon as humanly possible.
It's always a shitshow.
It approached sanity back with XHTML. (Score:2)
Then the What(TheFuck)WG people came in, and decided that their code should not adhere to defined standards, but have standards adhere and be defined by their browsers' spaghetti code mess. Like during HTML 3.x times.
And it went all downhill from there.
First the UI bling libraries. Then the massive frameworks. And them Google deliberately accelerating development and adding features until only Mozilla could keep up, to kill off everyone else.
Frankly, I decided Iâ(TM)m only doing "websites" by writing n
Ok, it's 2 AM soon. (Score:2)
So sorry for that typo peanut gallery.
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I think the biggest loss was the pushback against semantic markup. Documents now are intended solely for visual consumption by the well-abled.
The use of "functional" CSS classes to inject shorthand styles inline into everything is really the marker. Then, you need to work around them by defining "breakpoints" because you didn't design it so it could be continuously rescaled or even consumed in a completely non-standard fashion.
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I do not think I have ever "consumed" an application, a movie, a web page, a document, or a song. Nor have I ever consumed anything visually.
I have consumed more than a few steaks and foie gras is quite lovely to consume.
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consume (v.)
late 14c., "to destroy by separating into parts which cannot be reunited, as by burning or eating," hence "destroy the substance of, annihilate," from Old French consumer "to consume" (12c.) and directly from Latin consumere "to use up, eat, waste," from assimilated form of com-, here probably an intensive prefix (see com-), + sumere "to take," from sub- "under" (see sub-) + emere "to buy, take" (from PIE root *em- "to take, distribute").
The etymology is instructive.
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Yeah, doesn't make sense from the perspective of the object being consumed. But makes perfect sense from the consumer's point of view. I "consume" media in that my mind ingests them, then they become part of me.
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I do not think I have ever "consumed" an application, a movie, a web page, a document, or a song. Nor have I ever consumed anything visually.
I have consumed more than a few steaks and foie gras is quite lovely to consume.
Well observed! Just one more example of the widespread trend to use long obscure words instead of the obvious short simple ones.
In this and many other cases, "consumed" is just a pompous way of saying "used".
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In this and many other cases, "consumed" is just a pompous way of saying "used".
Hey, are you gonna consume that? Because I'd really like to leverage it!
The Great WYSIWYG Gap (Score:5, Informative)
One reason that "documents" and PDF's in particular are still common and popular and may never go away is because they are WYSIWYG. You may argue that "semantic layouts" and auto-flow are more logical or better accessibility*, but a good many people want to layout their documents a certain way and have them stay how they designed it. They put time in to place things how they want and don't want some browser or bot to shuffle it all around in unpredictable ways. And they don't want to wait for "web designers" to build their document.
Even with CRUD screens, the customer often says, "just put this widget up here", and then are frustrated when you explain that's not easy and/or not reliable with the web's auto-flow nature. It would be like the auto-mechanic telling you that one has to roll down the window before one can turn on the radio "because that's just how cars work now due to Flux Capacitors" or whatnot. Maybe the mechanic is right, or just making excuses, but either way you walk away grumbling and scratching your head. Auto-flow is the reverse of instant gratification. In their mind, tech is "supposed to" make life easier, not make object placement into a convoluted rocket science.
But current web standards just don't support direct WYSIWYG. Thus, PDF et. al. lives.
I suspect the pendulum swings back and forth between auto-flow and WYSIWYG and we'll see WYSIWYG and related standards come back in vogue. It's just more intuitive to the "cubicle masses". Thats-just-the-way-the-web-is cannot last forever if it rubs against human nature and patience. Somebody will eventually poke that theory and catch a popular wave.
* Accessibility matters less for internal documents, at least in the practical "legal risk" sense. I'm not making a value judgement either way, just describing human nature as I observe it. Also, WYSIWYG and semantic content encoding are not necessarily mutually exclusive, just a bit harder to tame together.
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Actually it can be either. I've seen mixed text and graphics of text in PDF's using dissection tools. Some OCR tools create images of problematic phrases of text it cannot recognize with enough confidence; the result is a mish-mash of text and graphics. It looks like a ransom note under the dissection software. And I've seen faxes turned into PDF's which ends up nothing more than a big image of a faxed page upon dissection. No actual text. PDF's are quite versat
"Birther" PDF side story (Score:2)
An interesting side-note is that some of the Obama "birther" theories stemmed from the fact that PDF compression software will reuse similar looking images or glyphs as part of the document compression algorithm. It's a common "trick" of compression software.
For example, it may take the image of a checkbox on one part of a form and virtually duplicate it in another to avoid storing two images of checkboxes
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Lossy Jbig2 compression is awful and should NEVER be used.
I've seen it switch out numbers many a time, and Cause real problems (for example courtroom evidence that was just outright wrong because it decided many 8's were 6's.
There was an article here about Xerox document scanners having similar problems.
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It's possible somebody set a machine's matching threshold too low in some cases to fit more files into something.
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Yes, the manufacturer in it's default recommended "document" scanning setting.
But undetectable compression artifacts are a real problem. Screwed up dates and transaction amounts that don't look illegible, but instead perfect, are a serious problem and if used for digitizing paper records can permanently destroy the accuracy of the document digitized (as I've witnessed personally more than once).
I know that space saving adds up blah blah, but we're talking about a pretty small in the scheme of things savings
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It's perhaps a case of using the wrong tool for the job. Perhaps Adobe Inc. overhyped their wares, in which case some funky lawsuits could result.
Documents that have legal implications probably shouldn't be reinterpreted by OCR or OCR-like software, except as a side reference, such as for text search engines or those who need to copy and paste text.
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This was the image, not OCR.
I guess you could say it's OCR like, but I'd argue that it's an outright bad idea (silent data corruption being possible).
With a jpeg style compression, you can lose the ability to read something, but you can tell, similar to a bad scan (a quick QC catches both). The problem with JBIG2 lossy compression is that you can get difficult to detect corruption of your image. And since it looks like a scanned image (since it is), there's not the hint that it may be problematic.
I'm not ag
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PDF (Proprietary Document Format) gained popularity because once upon a time it was immutable and did not contain executable code. It was an electronic version of a stack of printed paper. This is no longer the case. Proprietary Document Format is just as dangerous as, say, a Word document, for its ability to host a whole crapload of nasty shit against which one must now go to extremes to protect against.
Proprietary Document Format (PDF) should be dead.
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Early web pages were text with a picture or two maybe, and they tended to autoflow pretty well. Then designers got involved and every web page used fixed layout. Of course they were all the width of the largest common screen so F you if you had a smaller screen or wanted to see something else at the same time. Now the designers have invented "responsive" (i.e. reflowable) layouts and think they're the greatest thing ever.
You can lay web pages out by the pixel if you want to, but that's not really what HTML/
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It's not even close to pixel-exact. Different OS DPI settings and browser brands and zoom levels are different from each other too often. Fonts and text are especially inconsistent, wrapping in one case but not another. I've seen where upgrading a version of the same font created differences between clients. PDF's almost never mis-wrap different from the original.
In the early 2000's when peopl
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Hey, PDF is a crapshoot in that regard too.
For example, the spec says a highight annotation is to be rendered with QuadPoints and clipped to a rect. Adobe draws a rounded highlight even without an appearance stream. A PDF with an appearance stream to draw curved sides won't render as curves in Preview.app, but actually as the bounding rect!
And let's not even start on text and fonts...
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They do have bugs or inconsistencies, but I've found them much more reliable than HTML/CSS in that regard in practice. I'd give HTML/CSS a "D", but PDF's a "B+", per consistency.
I suppose graphic designers will be more likely to find edge cases and bugs in PDF's probably because they stretch the tool further than say an MS-Word user.
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"Adobe draws..." Here's a nickel, kid. Get yourself a better PDF viewer.
(With apologies to Dilbert: https://www.funsizebytes.com/p... [funsizebytes.com])
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Sadly, it's the closest thing to a spec that PDF has. The actual spec is flat out wrong. Order of the aforementioned QuadPoints? Spec claims counter-clockwise. They actually go in a Z-order.
So, what ends up happening is everyone gets Adobe to generate some garbage, and then they base their rendering loosely around that. Blame the company that continues to publish their own spec with a blatant error in it for years on end..
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PDFs also get screwed up if you screw with the fonts. Generally, they embed the fonts they use so that doesn't happen. You can also embed fonts in web pages. PDFs are also often rendered slightly differently by different renderers, just like web pages by different browsers.
You CAN make an HTML document that renders pretty consistently. You can make a PDF that doesn't. PDFs are certainly more often used for WYSIWYG layout, and are designed more with that in mind.
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As I mentioned nearby, PDF is not perfect, but does WYSIWYG much better than HTML/CSS on average (in existing browsers).
And I'm perfectly okay with somebody creating/using a new or different WYSIWYG standard. I'd like to see a GUI-friendly standard that has absolute coordinates as an option at least. That allows one to let the server do the layout instead of relying on the client, which then complicates the clie
Interesting surveillance (Score:4, Interesting)
> every application category is getting rebuilt as a web application, allowing continuous development, deployment, version tracking and collaboration
Surveillance should be on that list too.
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non-starter (Score:2)
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Everything Online is horrible (Score:5, Insightful)
The trend towards everything online is horrible for mission critical software. For one thing, constant revision is great, until an update breaks your workflow or removes a feature you used. And you cannot not upgrade. Or the service goes dark (outage or shutdown). Or you don't want to pay a subscription fee every month. Or they add ads. Or a 100 other reasons why web apps are stupid.
And the plus is... I'm sorry, I know some people like the ability to work on multiple computers without moving the files around via USB or directly over the internet. But mostly it's for the benefit of companies that want monthly payments and/or control.
You misspelled "BUBBLE" there. (Score:2)
And also "bullshit software-design-cargo-culting pseudo-products".
By those that call scriptable data structures and actually using a computer "dumb", and cumbersome and limiting finger-paintable Apple-vanity-sweating movie UI messes "cool".
Plastic psycho people. Silicon Valley iWeirdos from the parallel anti-dimension.
Just because you can ......... (Score:2)
As Frame.io (video!) and OnShape (3D CAD!) show, there's almost no native PC application that can't be rebuilt as a web app.
I remember back in the day some guy writing a backward-chaining inference engine in a series of Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets. It took a few hours to come to the conclusion that 1 == 1, but what the hell.
Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you should.
Instead of a flat grid of cells (Score:2)
Instead of a flat grid of cells...
That pretty much sums up the current trend of "productivity" startups.
This is our fault (Score:3)
See, back in the day, a lot of this sort of thing used to be the purview of MS Access / Filemaker / Alpha Five - applications that had their warts and their limits, but allowed people to do data entry with a preset form, and manipulate that data with reports. They didn't always scale well, and Access in particular had a nasty habit of breaking custom programming between releases...but you didn't need to be a database administrator to make one, and they were still a solid step up from Excel, or (shudder) tables in Word documents.
Then, IT started looking at those small databases with disdain, as if it was some travesty that users were taking the initiative to do things that way.
Then, those applications started getting relegated to niches and raising their prices, making them difficult to get the bean counters to purchase, unless you already had the kitchen sink edition of Office, making it even hardware to make competing entry-level database products.
So now, we have a renaissance of those sorts of small-time niche products, all basically being a web-based frontend with a database backend and some automatic report generation. These 'software startups' rarely offer an on--premise version of their software, rarely offer any meaningful exit strategy, are generally sold to people who don't have much concept of *why* we do things with locally stored binary files.
Teh Cloud (tm) will have its day, and enough people will be burned, and toward the end of the next decade people will feel safer with on-prem systems again, and the cycle will continue.
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This is spot-on. All these start-ups have a market because there's no current killer app for end-users building their own workflows for personal or company department use; every small widget must be created, tested and deployed by IT.
Since there's no enough IT muscle for all user needs nor good unified software solution for end-user data storage and sharing, people retort to shared folders, document e-mailing and copy-paste version control.
Any company providing a usable, easy-to-install subset of these esse
Meh (Score:1)
Nothing will be gained. (Score:3)
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Suddenly change their behavior over night, as the kids in charge start chasing the latest fads-- and if you complain, you'll be told that you need to keep up with the fast-changing world of software in the modern world, and they will assure you that the new UI is trend-compliant with the best thinking of the coolest of the cool kids.
Never trust anyone who makes disparaging remarks about Craigslist ("even Craigslist"): that's a company where the engi