via Ray:
We Don’t Sell Saddles Here — Stewart Butterfield:
The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour. In fact, it is useful to take this way of thinking as definitional: innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave. No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so. This is the best definition for an overused term I’ve heard in a while.
The whole piece is an enthralling call to arms to a group of people building a product.
This is the quote that got me:
It is almost inevitable that centralized internal communication systems will gradually replace email for most organizations over the next 10-20 years and we should do what we can to accelerate the trend and “own it”.
n.b. Stewart Butterfield also made Flickr.
It’s painful to say; but, I agree. A centralized (Slack) model will replace our current federated (email) one. And I’d rather a Flickr or a Slack won than an Instagram or a HipChat.
Why?
We are asking a lot from our customers. We are asking them to spend hours a day in a new and unfamiliar application, to give up on years or even decades of experience using email for work communication (and abandon all kinds of ad hoc workflows that have developed around their use of email). We are asking them to switch a model of communication which defaults to public; it is an almost impossibly large ask. Almost.
He goes on. But, in short, Stewart is using technology to shape his customers— anyone who collaborates online— into people who are transparent by default.
Maybe I’m reading something that isn’t there. But the way his organizations have prioritized ethical efforts like Creative Commons, microformats, open APIs, and open source; the way he has prioritized social justice; well, to me, yeah, it’s a hell of a call to arms.
