Last week, I released an online panel I had been working on called “Collaboration 3.0.” I solicited viewpoints from 18 different product leaders and executives from around the industry to answer the question:

What are the trends forming today that you think will redefine the tools people use to work together tomorrow?

We had a ton of content already, so I decided not to participate myself. Most of the trends I would have discussed were covered, but there were two I wanted to explore more fully on my own.

The “post-file” world

At first, cloud storage was about syncing specific files across devices — i.e., “I want to be able to access my work files on my home computer.” It had more to do with transport than anything else. But once the value of cloud storage became apparent, people started storing all their files there — not because they needed specific things on multiple computers, but because putting it in the cloud was a way to ensure they never had to think about it. This was the trend that built Dropbox.

Once people thought of the cloud as the hub of their data (rather than a transfer mechanism), companies like Google were able to offer tools that enabled content creation in the cloud. When you create a Google Doc, there’s no .doc or .pptx extensions, no storage capacity to worry about (Docs, Sheets and Slides don’t count toward your storage limit), and by default it lives on all of your devices. As far as the consumer is concerned, it’s not a file — it’s just content.

Consumers would never have been able to understand that without companies like Dropbox, and this trend is still in its infancy.

The second driver of the post-file world is the shift toward mobile. The iPhone was one of the first mass market computing devices that, at least from the consumer’s perspective, didn’t have a concept of files and a file path. Files are still relatively impotent on mobile — unless you download specific apps, they’re basically just read-only previews (even on many versions of Android, which do have a file path). That means that the entirety of the information you create on your phone is just content in an app, like how Google Docs is just content. As mobile devices consume more and more of our work activity, so will it our content creation. And as that happens, files will play less and less of a role in our work.

Several companies are making big bets on this thesis. Evernote’s Phil Libin recently announced this exact philosophy at the Evernote Conference this year, claiming that we need “a new set of metaphors.” Quip’s product is basically the embodiment of this idea, with messaging layered on top of it. Box has made moves in this direction, launching Box Notes on mobile in June. Slack’s recent acquisition of Spaces.pm hints at a similar line of thinking. We’ve been experimenting with some ideas in this space at Fetchnotes as well.

It’s going to be a long, uphill battle to “kill” files, but the seeds have already been sown. Across all of our devices, we’ll come to see content as exactly that — just content.

Ad hoc tools for ad hoc collaboration

This isn’t so much of a trend as it is a growing problem. Great strides have been made in helping persistent, neatly defined groups of people (teams, families, etc.) work more effectively together. That includes workplace chat tools like Slack, task management tools like Asana and Trello, and all manner of things in between. There are certainly still opportunities for innovation, but decent tools do exist.

What has not been solved at all is cross-group collaboration. Email is slowly being co-opted — and will eventually, I believe, be nearly eliminated — within distinct, persisting groups of people. But across groups, it still dominates. Email is a perfectly fine tool for correspondence, but it’s an atrocious tool for actually working with people. Increasingly, the world is moving away from tightly defined work groups and toward ad hoc, as-needed contributors (something Randy Lubin mentioned in his commentary). As this trend accelerates, we’ll see more of a need for tools that enable real collaboration with collections of people, rather than neatly defined teams. Google Docs is pretty much all we’ve got right now.

This is an extremely difficult problem, because ad hoc groups are hard to build businesses on top of — there’s no clear buyer, the incentive to adopt technology is low (because they change so fast), and the lack of clear definition makes them nearly impossible to market to. Like most hard problems, though, the solution is relatively simple but not at all easy: the tools we build need to be more frictionless.

To an exciting future!