I find enterprise software fascinating because it operates the entire economy and yet it frequently neglects every single principle of quality that software people may espouse. Slack is/has been the anti-enterprise enterprise tool — a real product, using web technologies, with emojis. So it’s fun to think through this acquisition. I have absolutely no inside knowledge. Press release via Business Wire.

Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack

Okay here we go! God I love a good acquisition press release. Salesforce actually has good PR that likes to sell, fittingly. Your typical tech giant’s PR is absolutely unreadable. Let’s see what we get. I hope at the very least that they replace the Slack “brush knock” tchk-tchk-tchk with the sound of Marc Benioff yelling “Ohana!”

Combination of #1 CRM platform with the most innovative enterprise communications platform will create the operating system for the new way to work, enabling companies to grow and succeed in the all-digital world

Strong out of the gate. No, that’s not what an “operating system” is, but whatever. No one cares.

SAN FRANCISCO — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, and Slack Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: WORK), the most innovative enterprise communications platform, have entered into a definitive agreement under which Salesforce will acquire Slack. Under the terms of the agreement, Slack shareholders will receive $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common stock for each Slack share, representing an enterprise value of approximately $27.7 billion based on the closing price of Salesforce’s common stock on November 30, 2020.

Sure, $28 billion. Absolutely makes sense. The world makes a lot of sense and this is one of the things that makes the most sense. Alternately, they got a steal; Slack was on a path to being 4–5x bigger. Can’t decide which. Doesn’t matter. What color is water? How long would it take to bicycle to the moon?

Combining Slack with Salesforce Customer 360 will be transformative for customers and the industry. The combination will create the operating system for the new way to work, uniquely enabling companies to grow and succeed in the all-digital world.

“Salesforce Customer 360,” man, that’s a lot to have in your mouth at once. That’s like swallowing marbles. I looked it up and it’s kind of like CORBA for Cloud, but the C stands for Customer. It gives you a way to have a common representation of customers across your cloud services, and then to operate on those records from different platforms. I don’t know. If I was living inside of Salesforce I’d probably think it was cool. I love data interchange.

“Stewart and his team have built one of the most beloved platforms in enterprise software history, with an incredible ecosystem around it,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce. “This is a match made in heaven. Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world. I’m thrilled to welcome Slack to the Salesforce Ohana once the transaction closes.”

Man you gotta love Benioff (I mean, you don’t but he’s going to try), he clearly worked for Larry Ellison, loved Larry Ellison, and then said, I will be the absolute opposite of Larry Ellison and yet still build the most phallic building in history. Just pure force of personality, progressive politics, utterly willing to make enormous deals, knows what he’s doing even if no one else does. I’ve told many tech-focused editors over the years to pay attention to him but you can see their brains go blank at the thought of that much enterprise-ness. “Match made in heaven.” That’s right. “Ohana.” Means family. Double down, go, go, gooooooo. BUSINESS. FAMILY. BELIEVE. GO. DO. WHAT IF DREAMFORCE NEVER ENDED WHAT IF DREAMFORCE WAS ALL YEAR LONG. I’d love to be inside of Marc Benioff’s head for a day. He’s the anti-Elon Musk. Any challenge you have, it just needs more Salesforce and more Ohana and you can solve it. And you’re not wrong! YOU’RE NOT WRONG.

“Salesforce started the cloud revolution, and two decades later, we are still tapping into all the possibilities it offers to transform the way we work. The opportunity we see together is massive,” said Stewart Butterfield, Slack CEO and Co-Founder.

Okay so. A leeetle less Ohana energy here.

“As software plays a more and more critical role in the performance of every organization, we share a vision of reduced complexity, increased power and flexibility, and ultimately a greater degree of alignment and organizational agility.

Hey Jim! Oh hey what’s up Mikaela? Oh nothing just creating a greater degree of alignment and organizational agility. Oh cool well I’ll leave you alone.

Personally, I believe this is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can’t wait to get going.”

All righty. Pulled it out in the clinch. Ohana all the way.

Acquisition to Create the Operating System for the New Way to Work

Sometimes you just smash that keyboard, look at the screen, and go YEAH ALL RIGHT.

The events of this year have greatly accelerated the move by companies and governments to an all-digital world, where work happens wherever people are — whether they’re in the office, at home or somewhere in between. They need to deliver connected experiences for their customers across every touchpoint and enable their employees to work seamlessly wherever they are.

Man, this says absolutely nothing specific about anything. The raw hot synergy coming off this paragraph could merge lead into gold. Let’s keep going.

Together, Salesforce and Slack will give companies a single source of truth for their business and a unified platform for connecting employees, customers and partners with each other and the apps they use every day, all within their existing workflows.

I guess this is the big idea? You’ll be on Slack and all the things you need to do to not get fired will be flying at you as little apps inside Slack. If Salesforce Customer 360 is a data/object hub-thing for integrating different kinds of customer data, Slack is the human/messaging hub. Slack is a human/software hybrid feed platform masquerading as a chat client already, so this will be like, we are going to wire it into the nexus of all customer data, and we will make groups of people superintelligent. In general though it’s (1) the way things are going; and (2) sort of normalizes Slack as an API for every possible enterprise task. This is good for business.

Slack to Become the New Interface for Salesforce Customer 360

Keep saying it! Make it real!

Salesforce is the #1 CRM that enables companies to sell, service, market and conduct commerce, from anywhere.

This is true. It’s pretty powerful. God knows I’ve seen some grisly implementations but nonetheless.

Slack brings people, data and tools together so teams can collaborate and get work done, from anywhere.

Also true!

Slack Connect extends the benefits of Slack to enable communication and collaboration between a company’s employees and all its external partners, from vendors to customers.

Weird they’d bring this up — Slack Connect is what lets you have multi-organization channels — as the Big Thing. Not sure why that gets pride of place here.

Slack will be deeply integrated into every Salesforce Cloud.

Salesforce refers to what most people call “cloud services” or “cloud platforms” as “clouds”; it’s a little confusing. Just one of their little Salesforce thingies. Salesthingies? Thingforces?

As the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360, Slack will transform how people communicate, collaborate and take action on customer information across Salesforce as well as information from all of their other business apps and systems to be more productive, make smarter, faster decisions and create connected customer experiences.

Okay.

Slack To Expand Enterprise Footprint as Part of the World’s #1 CRM

Okay this makes sense…

Slack serves leading organizations in every industry around the world, from the fastest growing startups to Fortune 500 companies, such as Starbucks, Target and TD Ameritrade, along with leading academic institutions, non-profits, and governments in more than 150 countries.

TD Ameritrade baby! Also “non-profits” and “academia” whatever those are. But TD Amerrrrritraaaade!

As part of the world’s #1 CRM, Slack will be able to expand its presence in the enterprise, not just among Salesforce customers, but for any company undergoing digital transformation.

This is one of the interesting parts, to me. Slack is the best example of product-led growth around. Come for the free tier, stay for the TD Ameritrade enterprise rollout, create billions in value. But translating product-led hockey-stick growth into the linear enterprise sales growth, where your customers are now deputy CTOs of Fortune 100,000,000 companies, is a grim business. It’s kind of anti-product work. The giant enterprise clients aren’t product-focused orgs, but they start to have demands on your roadmap. Building out products for those customers is incredibly hard and the companies that have done it are the ones you know: Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce. Salesforce has a loud, goofy, proactive, enormous enterprise culture that is the least likely to destroy the product vision for Slack. People seem to like working there. So if you were Slack and saw a lot of risk in building out an enterprise culture that could scale to $100 billion in revenue around your product roadmap, while Salesforce already has one and can actually use your product roadmap, getting bought by Salesforce would feel like a huge relief. I truly don’t know, though. I know lots of people at Slack but haven’t talked with anyone really since the pandemic started. Sorry if I mis-speculated.

Upon the close of the transaction, Slack will become an operating unit of Salesforce and will continue to be led by CEO Stewart Butterfield.

Everyone wins. In general Salesforce doesn’t wreck what it acquires. There’ll be lots to do. It could be genuinely good for Slack as a product in the long run.

Combination to Form the Largest Open Ecosystem of Apps and Workflows for Business

…True! Especially when you consider the Slack App world, and the number of giant things built atop Salesforce, and also the vast and infinite universe of Mulesoft.

Connecting people and data across systems, apps and devices is one of the biggest challenges companies face in today’s all-digital world.

Boy is it.

Slack’s open platform seamlessly integrates with more than 2,400 apps that people use to collaborate, communicate and get work done. With the largest enterprise app ecosystem, the Salesforce platform is the easiest way to build and deliver apps to connect with customers in a whole new way.

This is handwavy, but sure. Worth a try.

Together, Salesforce and Slack will create the most extensive open ecosystem of apps and workflows for business and empower millions of developers to build the next generation of apps, with clicks not code.

This is the part that’s a really big deal, maybe, and Slack has the product intelligence to pull this off in a way that a broad consumer base will find usable. Slack gets enterprise sensibility and sales culture, Salesforce gets Slack’s product focus. I’m guessing the idea here is that you’ll have Salesforce Clouds over here, Salesforce 360 over here, and you’ll have Mulesoft Mule Connectors, and you’ll configure everything, glue it together, and Slack will become the interface that people use to do the work, chat, assign tasks, review things, etc. This makes a lot of sense to me. Salesforce has always been enterprise-first, whereas Slack has been focused on product experience. Not that Salesforce doesn’t have good product experiences, it’s just…Salesforce.

As a result Salesforce has this vast portfolio of services where everything plugs into everything else and they promise you can build anything in a day but it somehow takes 18 months. And there’s no real…client or terminal for Salesforce. Just the web. There are a lot of web views and the Apex programming environment, and APIs, and so forth.

So if Slack is going to become the smart, interactive, group-based terminal interface for logging into the Salesforce mainframe…yeah, okay. Enterprises will love that. Apple doesn’t care, Microsoft won’t be able to achieve that with Teams because it still thinks people like interacting with services through windows, if not Windows. Oracle would never do anything this weird. Amazon might eventually rise up and do damage here. SAP might try but then it would have a 90-month emoji services rollout with enterprise emoji approval framework that is limited to six emoji per user per month.

Maybe this is a bet on a kind of post-GUI future where everything is a stream of conversation and “work” flows in and out of the channels, as opposed to a document-centric view of the world. And then you move like a freight train, or a Benioff-faced Thomas the Tank Engine, into more and more of ERP, eating away at SAP and Oracle, roping in more of the big consulting firms to your very own vision, and it’s playful, and a little dude in a bear costume keeps dancing and dancing, forever.

It’s possible! Or maybe they’re just gonna jam Slack in the middle of Salesforce and cross their fingers. I tell you, I wish my brain didn’t care about enterprise software, but I just remain fascinated. It’s so much stuff in there.

[Tons of boilerplate snipped.]

BofA Securities, Inc. is serving as exclusive financial advisor to Salesforce and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and Morrison & Foerster LLP are serving as legal counsel to Salesforce. Qatalyst Partners LP and Goldman Sachs & Co LLC are serving as financial advisors to Slack. Latham & Watkins LLP and Goodwin Procter LLP are serving as legal counsel to Slack.

Congratulations to money!

Who is this good for?

I have five-ish personas that I like to refer back to.

The mutual aid group helping with food insecurity in the neighborhood. This isn’t for them. They’ll keep using free Slack as long as they can, but they’re going to organize data with AirTable or Monday.com or just Google Sheets.

The headquarters of the office furniture distributor. They’re going to stay with Microsoft unless something magical happens. Dynamics is great, Teams is fine, buy your chair. Slack is for babies.

The graduate school program in design. They use lots of Slack, and manage admissions through a custom education-optimized Salesforce. It’ll be pretty complex to bring these two worlds together, though.

The 500-person consulting firm with six-month contracts. This is 1000% for them, yep.

The state health & social services agency. They might already use Salesforce for case management, with some horrible Mulesoft connection to Epic that doesn’t really work. They will LOVE Slack, emojis will feel like a revelation to them, &c.

2000 me: Wow you still work on the web, that’s amazing. It must be so easy to publish really interesting web pages.

2020 me: Technically, well, yes. Anything you could do 20 years ago, you can do today, and you can do much, much more. It’s cheaper, faster, and just all around better than it used to be. But it’s also far more complicated, and as always, it’s how people push against constraints that makes things interesting. So the overall interestingness has gone down, while the potential has increased.

Sure, the focus of the web has changed. In 2000, you could believe (and did) that there was something inherently good about lots of people starting up their own web servers, writing down their thoughts, and linking to the thoughts of others. But the number of people who want to maintain and pay for their own sites is extremely small. When mass audiences came to the web, they came to read lots of web pages…but also to read their email, to chat, to listen to music, shop for stuff, play games, on and on. That’s where they spend time and money. Naturally, the infrastructure of the web today prioritizes building experiences like these. Like, for example, Spotify, which consolidates many of the albums ever produced and lets you listen to them for a monthly fee, or funded by advertising.

’00: That must create some amazing opportunities for musicians!

’20: It does in some ways, but in practice it’s another middleman between artists and the public, and it pays out a grievously low amount to artists. The dynamics are similar to those of online advertising on blogs. A much better platform is Bandcamp, but it doesn’t provide the infinite-library that Spotify does. People will pay for subscriptions to big platforms, and linger over every $2 purchase. For lots of reason, low-friction platforms tend to really favor the platform owners, not the content creators.

’00: There also must be some really good music discussion forums.

’20: Independent forums are mostly dead, swallowed up by Reddit, social media, and the like. I cannot overemphasize how much the lesson of the web is that people, given the choice between the freedom of operating and managing their own platform, and running a centralized platform that they do not control, will choose the centralized platform. The desire of regular people, people with things to do, to also become systems administrators is far less than what we assumed it would be.

’00: Are there like a million new HTML tags?

’20: Just a few. The days of new HTML tags being exciting new tools, able to change the way people communicate around the world, are long gone. HTML today is a templating language for adding structure to text, and a container format that bootstraps apps.

’00: I bet! Are we up to like XHTML 9 with two-way links? God I bet blogs are amazing now. How do people even know what to read?

’20: The idea of having one universal, extensible, self-documenting data format based in XML never caught on. In general, we’ve found, the goals of universality and extensibility always lose to specificity, ease, deadlines, budgets. We had Smalltalk and LISP to teach us that, but we didn’t learn. We’ll never learn! However, two-way links do show up in specific contexts—especially inside of wikis, which are wonderful, and which have been used to make the most thorough representation of all human knowledge to ever exist in Wikipedia.

As to blogs, well, alas, they turned out to be a kind of interstitial format — what brought billions of people to the web was not short essays or even big photos, but rather nearly-live, endless conversation. I think what divides nerds from everyone else is that we find our labor relaxing. Or more specifically that if you have an obsession and time and resources to pursue it, blogging is fun, actually. Personally, I think it’s relaxing to write this, even though 150 people will read it at most, because it lets me resolve internal tensions and organize my thoughts. The reward for doing good work is more work. But most human beings find labor…laborious. Most people don’t have obsessions with boring, abstract things. They don’t get the chance. And they don’t have lots of time they can use to write “for free.” There are many theories about how this all works, including, say, Marxism.

But in terms of the web, its popularity meant that XHTML2, which was as utopian and abstract a standard for representing ideas as has existed since Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, didn’t gain traction, and ultimately Google drove HTML5, which was all about crafting apps, into existence. The same can be said of the Semantic Web. Call it the Tragedy of the Noosphere: Zones of pure thought work great until everyone shows up and wants to check their email.

’00: People thought I was naive, but I always knew that, since the web was so open, people would find their voices there by writing and making things online. And then obviously they’d learn how the web really worked, and build their own systems and tools in order to empower themselves and their communities.

’20: Ah my sweet summer child, etc, etc. This actually happened; you weren’t totally wrong. But it happened in small, local ways that struggled for impact in the broader scheme of things, while the web became one of the biggest things in history. It’s easy — unbelievably easy compared to how it had been— to set up community forums, raise money for a cause, and so forth. But you’re in competition with a lot of other things when you do this. In a lot of ways this happens with every medium. Early TV proponents were excited that people would be able to watch Shakespeare plays at home and get educated. There’s still a lot of great TV to watch, in the scheme of things.

’00: …How does HTML work now?

’20: HTML is in a long interstitial period and I’d guess over the long term it’s headed for a kind of bifurcation, but it’s unclear if there’ll be an attempt to standardize that bifurcation or if it’ll just evolve out of the platform. There are still lots of web pages in HTML, with lots of links and embeds. But there are lots of incredibly large web apps too, and increasingly they’re built in a very abstract way, using dataflow-style programming, and software decides when to update or change the page. HTML is now the Display Postscript of the web (this is kind of a deep cut but I stand by it). Personally, what I wish would happen is for two profiles to emerge: Web Document Profile and Web Application Profile.

Web Document Profile is the one you use to publish stuff, make it look good, and add some interactivity , and make it accessible to all— HTML+CSS as 2000 me would understand it, updated for 2020, and it’s what you use to build public resources and university websites and SEO-optimized blogs. Maybe with a defined protocol for editing in-browser so that it’s easier to build Wikipedias.

Web Application Profile could be defined in terms of the WebAssembly virtual machine plus a standard a library. An app could be written in any language that targets the VM, and from there interact with a lot of different services, including the DOM, a virtual DOM, a new, less painful version of the DOM, a WebGL canvas (for games), a 2D canvas, Cairo, a video player controller, etc. Basically exactly what Java tried to do over and over, now with the browser as a sandbox, i.e. it’s open and distributed to billions of people. This would mean that things like “WebUSB” could be shoehorned into a virtual machine, as a service with a consistent API, and exposed to any language that targets the web platform, instead of shoehorned into JavaScript.

Web Application Profile would be really good for building mobile/desktop apps using web technologies and it would let us be less reliant on frameworks like Electron or React Native.

People complain about the web as a programming environment but it’s wonderful at orchestration and network access, and a lot of software problems come down to orchestration and network access, especially on the web. Go figure. This is all handwaving though, and someone would have to build it, and a zillion people would have to use it, before anyone would bother to standardize it. But we’re definitely feeling the pain of these worlds being separate.

’00: How do you change the <title>?

’20: When I said “you can’t,” this was a little joke, and I was sure someone would correct me, and of course they did. That part of the web hasn’t changed. The React Framework, which is the dominant front-end framework now, is all about replacing the body of the HTML page with a dynamic area that is fully controlled by JavaScript. It’s totally possible to change the <title> of a page, but it means reaching out from your functional code to the raw DOM and having a side effect, and it’s not intuitive, and it reveals the friction between the abstractions of React and the reality of the legacy web. Per the above.

’00: I admit I find that confusing, but that’s okay, I’ll just read the web standard. Sounds like the W3C has been busy.

’20: They have, after a fashion. But as the web platform grew the W3C became like many other standards bodies — a source of endorsement, a place for coordination. More descriptive than prescriptive. And JavaScript, which is used to hold everything together, is managed by ECMA. So it’s all a little odd. One of the most valuable things the W3C does is to continue to advocate for the web as an open platform that is accessible to everyone. And there’s even an XSLT3. But in general standards are implemented by browser vendors and then you learn through tutorials about the relevant parts, rather than reading the standard and figuring out how to make things work.

’00: And speaking of big web things, did AOL win out over Yahoo? [Laughing.] Did they merge to compete with Microsoft? We used to joke about that.

’20: Maybe the better way to describe it is that they got thrown into the same grave. AOL and Yahoo are both now part of Oath, which belongs to Verizon. Both of them reacted to the growth of the Web by becoming media companies, in the business of selling lots of advertising on top of their digital experiences. That’s where they saw growth, but that made them vulnerable to the strategies of giant platform companies.

’00: Interesting. And I bet the tools for building sites —

’20: Apps. Of course you can still build sites, but much of the hard work has been commoditized and abstracted away. Which is good. I’m writing this on Medium, right? A lot of what used to be dynamic and worthy of argument has become standardized. If you need to build your own site, WordPress, with its plugin system, gets you about 90% of the way there; there are countless other options as well.

’00: Right. They must be amazing, yes? I mean in 2000 I have to use emacs on a Linux machine.

’20: The tooling is amazing, frankly. I’ve written about it elsewhere. Everything works really well. Emacs evolved in some really interesting ways and I use it every day — it’s got a hierarchical editor mode called org-mode now that’s superb. It’s a little hamstrung because it’s single-threaded, although there are workarounds. So there’s still room for plain text. But programming and building things is still difficult, text-driven, involving tons of files and lots of complexity. You have your choice of totally free, well-supported IDEs and programming environments, and as many free languages as you’d like. Linux is a great desktop operating system these days; it’s got some weird edges but it basically works great. I’m using it now.

’00: Is Microsoft still around or did open source destroy them?

’20: There’s an angle where you could say that open source destroyed Microsoft. The aggressive, monopolistic culture of Microsoft just couldn’t scale to the size of the Internet, and of course the last people willing to believe that were the people who ran Microsoft. First, Google took over search, which meant that it had an enormous platform for distribution, marketing its own software products, and a huge portion of online ad revenue to fund future growth. This was the end for shrink-wrapped software with extreme margins.

Apple took ownership of a new consumer category, the smartphone, which turned out to be the single greatest digital consumer category that has ever existed, and never let go of its moat or margins. Google started Android and followed the Microsoft playbook with OEMs. And Amazon bootstrapped a true cloud services platform. All of this, including Apple’s smartphone OS, was done on the back of Unix — sometimes just at the kernel level, sometimes including the userland — thus cutting Microsoft entirely out of the ecosystem. The rest of the giants used Microsoft’s strength and dependency on Windows against it. Microsoft ultimately started to show its age and accept that it was better to run Linux on Windows in hell than serve MSN web pages in heaven.

’00: I knew it! Good riddance. I knew the web would become the world’s operating system.

’20: That’s actually true. It really happened. Although I guess a more accurate thing to say is that the web has become the world’s windowing toolkit.

’00: And that it would empower so many people. I bet Perl 6 is huge as a result. How big is the CPAN library these days?

’20: Pretty big, and still maintained. There’s Perl all over the place out there, it’s just not very cool. Perl 6’s eternal development cycle is a fascinating journey into the heart of programming culture, and what computers are for, and why programming languages exist. Maybe that’s a conversation for another time. Interestingly the big fight of the early days, dynamic vs. compiled, has transformed into a fight about type systems. It’s all pretty pointless at this stage; you can educate yourself about the tradeoffs and decide on what’s right for the project. What has changed a lot is that languages tend to be bootstrapped onto existing platforms: Clojure on top of the JVM, with interop with Java (and ClojureScript on JavaScript); TypeScript on top of JavaScript. JavaScript. Flutter with Dart compiling to JavaScript. There are 20 ways to write JavaScript, and the “right” way is a hot topic, and always will be, I guess. The WebAssembly virtual machine is interesting because it combines two of these trends: A virtual machine that can be targeted by any compiled language, and, by implication of being part of the web, JavaScript.

’00: And I almost hate to ask, but did Apple survive?

’20: Not really! But NeXT sure did.

Web Conversation From the Other Side was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2000 me: Wow you still work on the web, that’s amazing. It must be so easy to publish really interesting web pages.

2020 me: Uhhhhh. [Very long pause.] Look, you can pay a low monthly fee and listen to any album anyone ever made.

’00: That must create some amazing opportunities for musicians!

’20: Well.

’00: There also must be some really good music discussion forums.

’20: Huh.

’00: Are there like a million new HTML tags?

’20: It’s complicated.

’00: I bet! Are we up to like XHTML 9 with two-way links? God I bet blogs are amazing now. How do people even know what to read?

’20: You could say we…solved that.

’00: See, that’s such a relief. People thought I was naive, but I always knew that, since the web was so open, people would find their voices there by writing and making things online. And then obviously they’d learn how the web really worked, and build their own systems and tools in order to empower themselves and their communities.

’20: They released more than 80 Christmas movies this year alone.

’00: Not sure what that has to do with the web, or with empowering people?

’20: It’s complicated.

’00: You keep saying that. How does HTML work now?

’20: It’s pretty simple, you define app logic as unidirectional dataflow, then fake up pseudo-HTML components that mirror state, and a controller mounts fake-page deltas onto the browser surface.

’00: How do you change the <title>?

’20: You can’t.

’00: I admit I find that confusing, but that’s okay, I’ll just read the web standard. Sounds like the W3C has been busy.

’20: Well…

’00: And speaking of big web things, did AOL win out over Yahoo? [Laughing.] Did they merge to compete with Microsoft? We used to joke about that.

’20: Maybe the better way to describe it is that they got thrown into the same grave.

’00: Interesting. And I bet the tools for building sites—

’20: Apps.

’00: Right. They must be amazing, yes? I mean in 2000 I have to use emacs on a Linux machine.

’20: Huh. [Looks at emacs running on a Linux machine.]

’00: Is Microsoft still around or did open source destroy them?

’20: [Thinks.] There’s an angle where you could say that open source destroyed Microsoft.

’00: I knew it! Good riddance. I knew the web would become the world’s operating system.

’20: That’s actually true. It really happened.

’00: And that it would empower so many people. I bet Perl 6 is huge as a result. How big is the CPAN library these days?

’20: Almost impossible to measure.

’00: No surprise there. And I almost hate to ask, but did Apple survive?

This started as a Twitter thread. I also wrote a followup in which I answer the questions more seriously.

I know the title seems evocative but it’s literal. I have a lot of dumb ideas for stories I’ll never finish. I’d rather just write them down, hit publish, and go looking for some new stories instead of keeping these rattling in my head.

For example: Two kids get decoder rings for Christmas. One kid moves away. Never writes again, they fall out of touch. Lots of sadness, etc. Later the codes start appearing all over the place, as out-of-order addresses, things like that. The unvanished kid (now in their 30s) thinks they’re losing it. Shrink says, you’ve got unprocessed thoughts from childhood. The codes start revealing places to go, things to see, thoughts to think. Eventually it becomes clear that the kid who left was the one running the simulation; they miss their toy/pet. “I had a bet you could figure it out.” Of course you can never leave the simulation.

When David Bowie died the great teenage transitional figure went out of the world and people wrote about the moment they discovered him; it was typically somewhere in adolescence and suddenly they had succor for their weirdness. It’s an oral history: Make someone up who is an incredibly cool pop star and have people write about how they discovered him and discovered something fundamental about themselves, until it’s clear he’s basically the worst person who ever existed and that every fan is basically a horrible murderer.

About 7 years ago I wrote like 20k words on what it will be like when people can live in any decade they want using augmented reality, and how a future NYC would work when all the years blurred together and everyone had to pick a decade of NYC to live in, as all other kinds of culture basically disappeared. The story starts right before midnight in 2029, 2019, 2009, 1999, 1989, 1979, etc, and no one knows if their decade is going to start over or if they’re going to have to grow into the next year. We came to New York together after college and here we are in 1979. She works in an art museum. I work at a bank. Our small apartment is sunburst clocks and round abstract shapes. But when the switch comes to the 1980s what will she be? We talk about it. The clock is ticking. She would like to start over again. She despises the 1980s. “Shoulder pads,” she says. “Hairspray. Diet Coke. Computers overtaking every desk.” But if some of us move forward and some move backwards, what will we become? I still want to come back to this one but I remember writing like 2,000 words about how the big shared clock service was run out of Carnegie Mellon on a tamperproof web server. Dreadful.

This dumb thing I would wake up to which was about how lost dogs slept in the entrances of libraries all around the city and it turns out the dogs all know each other and have some sort of silent language. He follows one to the waterfront and sees that all the library dogs like to get together and look at boats. But the protagonist never figures it out. However, he just starts taking care of and feeding the dogs, and paying for them to see the vet. (This was a story about how we take care of things even though we have no idea what they are or will become.)

This noir thing called The Dictionary Killer, another 5k words written, which was about a guy getting out of the army after WWII and going to a halfway house, and since a dictionary from the early 30s is the only book left on the shelves he reads it and starts finding secret messages in the dictionary, which are pretty obviously about doing some murders. It turns out there was a serial killer who worked at the printshop, and he dropped his confessions into certain definitions. The protag. goes and asks after the people who typeset the dictionary and finds out that the person of interest had prior worked as a typesetter of playbills, and before that had been in a traveling Vaudeville act in the 1910s. Protagonist now starts to trace back the act and figures out that said act, which was a sort of comedy/musical revue, had done a particularly vile murder spree across America. This act is famous because the star of the act is now a famous radio comedian. Protagonist finds the dictionary-typesetting guy who tells him he was forced to participate by the now-famous radio comedian. Ends in bloodshed and confession.

Bug reports on U.S. politics. What I expected to happen, what happened, steps to reproduce the problem (usually just “racism” or “9/11”). Electoral college, Homeland Security. Bug report: Florida. The bugs don’t get fixed so it becomes crash reports. QA team increasingly frustrated. “We’ll never beat our competition if we let Facebook take this part over.” Cuts off in the middle of a civil war.

It’s 2007 and about to be 2008. There has been a standing weekly conference call for the last five years for the developers of an operating system for a specific kind of mobile phone. They work inside a particularly vast global company. But the iPhone is out now, and the project, despite the little animated bear that squeaks, the cool address book, the fun games, the easy keypad, is absolutely doomed. It was living on fumes before, and the team has already been cut three times. An expected deal with a major telecom vanished. So the forces above finally shut it down. Everyone is just cleaning up their respective offices in three or four time zones, turning in badges, putting code and assets on the Z drive, complaining. This is the last conference call before the team disperses. At first no one shows up then everyone does. People chatter, share local news, talk about who’s turning the lights off. Some have likely jobs, others don’t. It’s done as a script, with different voices identified by job title and office location. Some admit that the iPhone won the race. Some curse out Steve Jobs as a fraud and believe that the lack of a phone keyboard will doom Apple. Eventually it comes down to a hardware guy in San Francisco, the person who did the cool icons in Atlanta, and the middle manager in New York (their big boss is of course already gone to the next thing). They’ve been on this project for four of its five years together and know each other’s children. They say sweet things for a minute and then say their goodbyes; they’d like to work together again; etc. “I mean, I know it never happens, but even so, it would be great if we could keep in touch.” Finally people hang up, and the middle manager has his moment alone, sitting there in the silence. The automated lights in the office turn off on him and so he’s there in dark. He drops his prototype phone, never released, into a fake-wood-colored box and hangs up his black desk phone, and the five-year-call is over.

Apparently we are due for a national period of healing and a period of cooling off. Every time I hear things like that, I immediately think of this video:

A normal reaction upon seeing that is to ask, What in God’s name did I just watch? The answer depends on how you see the world.

From a geological point of view you just visited Goblin Valley State Park in Utah, where 165-million-year-old jutting rocks have eroded over eons to form mushroom-like formations called “hoodoos” or “goblins.”

From an ecological point of view an invasive mammal has just knocked over one of the hoodoos while vocalizing “Wiggle It” by French Montana.

From the people in the video’s point of view, it was a fun day out with some Boy Scouts. The day was so fun, in fact, that they put this video on the Internet, in order to share their power and joy.

From the state (Utah)’s point of view, this violated the state’s carefully asserted rights to determine what should happen to these rocks. Although it must be a bit of a mixed blessing, because this video made Goblin Rocks internationally famous.

And from Wikipedia’s point of view:

The men claimed that the hoodoo appeared ready to fall, and that it was intentionally knocked over to prevent park visitors from being hurt….The two leaders were subsequently dismissed from their leadership roles by the Utah National Parks Council, which is a local council of the Boy Scouts in Utah. The national Boy Scouts then removed the men from the scouting organization altogether. In January 2014, two of the men — the one who toppled the hoodoo and the cameraman — were arraigned on felony charges of “criminal mischief” and “intentionally damaging, defacing and destroying property.” The two men pleaded guilty to lesser charges of criminal mischief and attempted criminal mischief, and received a sentence of one year probation plus fines and case-related fees.

There are many other points of view I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader: Religious, leftist, conservative, eco-spiritual, Utah-historical, libertarian, &c.

Have you ever launched a product or website? “Look what digital wonders I have made,” you proclaim, unveiling your new thing, carefully crafted from sandstone over eons of your life. “I made it for all of my beloved friends!” And then, baying from across the valley you hear, in response, “Wiggle it…just a little bit” and the sound of crashing rock. In other words, this video is the best user persona you’ll ever see.

If you’ve been a teenager in America you might recognize at least a little of the spirit therein, the natural disaster that is us, unleashed on an ancient landscape. At least I do. America is a lot of things, including Boy Scouts knocking over rocks. It’s hard to preserve the history of wind on rock when faced with 328 million people who want a burger and a good time. Or to lower the curve of new cases when 50 million people may travel home for Thanksgiving, with the full blessings of their respective governors.

The hardest of all the viewpoints to adopt, for me, is the empathetic one. Something brought them. They didn’t stay at home and watch TV. These are humans who went to the rocks. They wanted the pleasure of smashing the rocks, and didn’t fully understand just how much the rest of us rely on knowing that some things are sacred…. And then I just get pissed off. But one day I’ll have fully processed this video without my mind going blankout white.

We face a huge challenge, when it comes to all our stuff—websites, vehicular traffic, human interaction, trips to the desert, walks in the woods, tweets. Because people just keep moving fast and doing things. Knocking over rocks, cutting down trees, crashing into pedestrians, letting people publish lies. The better world is the one where things are left undone. But our nature is to keep doing things. In fact, that’s one of the things I like most about people. I’d be very sad if we stopped doing new things.

People often talk about returning to a mythical past state where things were simpler and good. Sometimes people point to a time where men only wore long pants, sometimes they mean “before agriculture.” As if the world has an undo button. But the past is immutable. The only unbreakable thing in the world is the past! Which means you can really only do new things, even if they feel like you’ve done them before. Over and over, new things, for your whole life. It feels strange to put it like that, like I should have changed more, made more of my thoughts, imagined more broadly. But you got to work with what you have.

Eventually, the current chaos will subside. What will the tech industry look like over the next four years? What should we expect?

These aren’t predictions as much as possibilities. The point here is not to magically assert the future, but rather to think about places where pressure is building up, and where things might change as a result. Also, after a year of mounting bad news, it’s very therapeutic to imagine some good news. Here are some things I’ll be watching.

The Big Changes

Regulation: There’ll be more

This one is obvious: There are going to be many more congressional hearings about social media, app store guidelines, platform lock-in, and the like. Policymakers will draft new regulations around transparency and labeling media sources. Maybe protecting consumer privacy sounds good, but much of this policy will simultaneously peck away at user privacy in the interests of law enforcement.

As this unfolds, copyright holders (news and other media) will line up asking for kickbacks from the social networks, and also will ask in many ways for the government to break (especially) Apple’s 30% lock on in-app purchases. European efforts like the GDPR or even the Right to Be Forgotten will be mined for inspiration.

All of this will come as a relief at first, and then cause a massive internet freakout as we see just how many things are being horse-traded in tech regulation’s name. Eventually, sure, the industry will just code the legislation into terms of service, make everything opt-in, and keep printing money. But there’ll be a lot to work out first.

Silicon Valley: It’ll be weird

It’s going to be an odd stretch for Silicon Valley. Lots of tech leaders abhor regulation, so there’ll be a lot of stomping around on Twitter and Clubhouse and Parler and wherever else tech libertarians go to farm their rage. Simultaneously, half of the USA sees “tech” as a democracy-destroying monster, which is bad for the brand. And, meanwhile, the pandemic has shown people how to work at home — and the FAANG companies will only become more physically decentralized, even as the services they provide (and acquire) will become more digitally centralized.

If I were being cynical I’d say that it’s a shame Halt and Catch Fire is already a TV show, because it’s a great way to describe Silicon Valley’s geopolitical future. And yet…I’m bullish, as usual. City-states are an ancient technology that work really well. A lot of people will work from home, and a lot of Twitter-account VCs will complain about the fascism of any form of regulation. But then they’ll invest in new startups that create marketplaces to trade around the new regulations, and everyone will go to The French Laundry to celebrate their C round, or whatever it is that VCs do. In the long run, tech is everywhere — when you pick up your phone, you don’t care that AT&T was a New York City company — but it’s still a long run, and Silicon Valley has a lot of money and ideas to go. It’ll keep breeding unicorns.

Civic tech: Lots to build on

The good people of the US Digital Service, 18F, and other civic tech ventures have all been working steadily over the past four years, like ambulance drivers in a bad hurricane. Many thanks to them!

Now it looks like a lot of energy is going to go into making a better, more responsive digital government, and instead of starting from scratch, this time there’s a ton of work done around accessible design systems, basic tech infrastructure, authentication and identity, and so forth. Which means that people working in civic tech with broad mandates should be able to ship meaningful services to civilians or servicemembers with months, not years, of work.

And you can increasingly expect government orgs to ship good stuff: open source code, scalable APIs optimized for reuse, and so on, rather than monolithic software. As a result, the U.S. government “platform” is going to keep growing and getting more valuable, month over month, and lots of people who wouldn’t have wanted to serve under Trump are going to want to help. Which is great, as long as they listen and learn before starting to code. (Check out Cyd Harrell’s book, A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide.)

There’s one huge caveat here: Contracting. It’s still ridiculously difficult for smaller, more nimble organizations to work with the government. (For example, a few years ago I started talking with a government agency about some work it wanted Postlight to do, and it dragged on so long that my contact…retired.) So even if the tools are good, and the desire for progress is real, execution will be hard. Giant orgs will still take government money, burn it, and ship a month’s work in a year. And of course, we’ll still only be talking about a few systems out of thousands. Still! Fun to watch, with big impact.

Climate work: Here it comes

As climate guidelines get baked into law, and thus into business requirements, and money frees up to implement new climate guidelines, climate sensitivity will need to be baked into technology platforms. For example, if you’re a giant company deciding where to buy your aluminum, you’ll need to factor in the carbon involved in mining, refining, and shipping, and weigh that against a bunch of other factors. If you gain any kind of credit for that, how do you exchange it? (In Kim Stanley Robinson’s new book he posits a sort of blockchain for carbon credits, and I mean, whatever works.)

A lot of this has started already. But much more will need to happen in the big sleeping whales of software: inside enterprise resource planning systems, mapping tools, and the like, built into SDKs. It’ll be dry stuff, but there’s a lot to do. Judging from Postlight’s inbound queue of work, I expect this to be a major growth area for client services over the next…well, probably forever.

Social fragmentation: We can hope

The monolithic hold of social media over the internet’s attention is starting to fragment. First, self-regulation by orgs will change some dynamics — like Facebook’s promise to stop running political ads (eventually), or Twitter’s labeling of “disputed claims” on Trump’s tweets. Government regulation will change it further.

It seems inevitable that “third places” will show up — the “first place” is email and chat, the second is established social platforms with all their rules, and the third are places that are somewhat public but not open to all, new platforms where people can yell and stomp around and be themselves, like the far-right Twitter clone Parler, which will probably implode due to infighting but will lead to a lot of Mother Jones articles in the meantime. Or Mastodon instances, or small Slack communities. Ultimately it’s a pretty small percentage of people who want to fight all the time; most humans want to trade recipes, say stupid stuff about sports, and engage in mild piracy without anyone yelling at them. In addition to severely damaging democracy, the big social platforms are doing a bad job of filling that market need, so I’d expect other solutions to arise.

Be mindful, though: The social giants aren’t going away. Trump will still be tweeting in 2024, and hundreds of millions of people will be engaged/enraged. But the platforms can’t remain this monolithic and centralized; humans are just too inconsistent to keep this mess going.

So, what to do?

So how will this trickle down to we the people, who make the platforms and apps with our keyboard-typing and mouse-moving? This is obviously even more of a set of guesses than the above, but consider some new probabilities.

Expect a lot of opting in

The idea that you can track someone around the internet — because…well, because you want to — could fade away, partially because of moves by Apple, and probably because of some influence from the government. You’re going to have to ask people for data, not just help yourself, and you may need to give people the right to manage and erase their own data. I could even imagine that being automated — imagine a really big DO NOT EMAIL list controlled by the government, but with teeth. The right time to have started collecting opt-in email addresses that can be used as unique account IDs was 20 years ago; the second best time is today.

Start looking for ways to “climate enable”

Climate science is hard, and if you’re a tech-oriented person, it’s a little…well, boring. There’s no IDE or YouTube tutorials, just a lot of science. But it’s pretty likely that the next four years will involve a lot of global warming mitigation efforts, and that means lots of sensors out there, lots of data to analyze, lots of machine learning models to evaluate, lots of supply chains to optimize in new ways. It won’t all be carbon calculators.

It’ll trickle down. You might build accelerated insurance claims software for people whose homes are damaged by increased flooding. Or tools for notifying people about weather events. Or build tools for hardware chains to help people pick more sustainable, resistant home repair materials. Better fire notification systems. Platforms for emergency preparedness. Tools to help farmers manage and predict drought.

I know this sounds kind of dystopian. That’s because it is. But it’ll happen bit by bit, and as it happens, people will still be buying things through their phones and filling out forms. When you see that McKinsey is coming down hard on the need for organizations to adapt to climate change, you know that the rest of capitalism will eventually follow.

Light a candle in hopes of app store changes

This is a stretch, and wishful thinking, but just imagine for a moment if Apple suddenly was forced to charge 5% for in-app purchases instead of 30%. You’d see a vast, thriving ecosystem bloom in hours. It’s just a huge tax we all pay. Fun to think of what you’d do if you could get a quarter of your revenue back! You could do so many more interesting things with that money, whereas Apple will just use it to hold more events announcing updates to Apple Watch.

Fun fact: Just before we hit “publish” on this post, Apple announced that small businesses will have their app tariffs lowered to 15%. I wonder why they made that decision right now, after 12 years? Hmm!

Experiment with new distribution strategies

Social media plus Google ads have taken all the air out of every room and it’s essentially impossible to make something new and share it with an audience, without paying tons of money to billionaires, or turning everything you make into memes. Plus, no one visits home pages.

That’s why newsletters are big now: Because they provide reliable, predictable, cheap means of distribution since social won’t and can’t. Another means of distribution is phone notifications; the New York Times, for example, is hiring a full-time mobile notifications editor.

So even though one-off apps are weak sauce, people will keep making them because they let you regularly ask for attention and engagement without paying Facebook or Twitter for the privilege. You could even see a renaissance in RSS feed readers (Substack is apparently building its own!).

Creating audience without paying a huge tax to some utterly disinterested gatekeeper is the great challenge of our age.

Somehow podcasts will ignore all of this but keep doing fine.

Going big

Maybe over the next four years little changes: The social networks and Google agree to behave a little better. Fake news flare-ups are a normal part of life, but everyone follows a more transparent rulebook. The newsletter fad crashes because no one wants to pay for that much media, and big players like The New York Times and The Washington Post keep growing. There are more privacy rules to follow, but in general, if you use well-known user tracking and analytics platforms, you don’t get into too much trouble.

Or perhaps it will come down to a change in tone: The Biden administration focuses on “de-polarization” (a little different than bipartisanship) and makes social media a big target of action while encouraging the Republicans to reject Trumpism, in the hope that America can just chill out. The FCC starts to keep closer tabs on a lot of FAANG companies, including bigger telecoms. As a result, the giant platforms go on a charm offensive and start working together around pandemic preparedness, climate, and so forth — i.e., helping the administration with its policy goals in their own self-interest. The changes start to trickle down at the API and SDK levels, with things like Apple’s CarbonKit.

For fun, let’s turn the dial all the way. Maybe we’re headed to a huge climate-driven economic reboot: VCs funding climate mitigation marketplaces, the option for every Amazon purchase to be offset, huge amounts of government spending, vast changes in finance, insurance, and real estate. Partnerships with China on climate start to change the trade relationships as well, and more Chinese software platforms get relaunched in the U.S., à la TikTok. TPP gets resurrected. Huawei is forgiven and buys the state of New Mexico!

Or maybe there will be pressure from all corners, leading to increased regulation and pressure to break up major components into multiple companies: Amazon to split off cloud, Apple to manage in-app purchase rates, rules about lock-in, everyone managing their own data. That’s a lot of change for four years, though.

And of course I’ve mostly neglected the gaggle of black swans out there flapping around. I’m assuming vaccines, stability, a relatively stable market — I left out a lot of the bad stuff, because I think we’ve been playing those scenarios out for years now. We already know what it looks like when tech treats humans like a cheap natural resource.

What’s obvious to me is that the next four years will be an opportunity for tech to de-center itself from every single conversation about politics and culture. It can do that by accepting that it’s…infrastructure. (I love infrastructure.) I know we’re supposed to be the most disruptive industry, but the world doesn’t seem to be craving any more disruption. Maybe we could focus on stabilizing institutions instead of destroying them. Just for a minute. Even half a minute. One can always hope.

Paul Ford is the CEO and Co-Founder of Postlight. This piece was originally published on Postlight’s Insights Blog. Talk to him about digital transformation at hello@postlight.com and find him on Twitter @ftrain.

Postlight is a company that builds digital platforms and products, and like every firm we like to market ourselves and tell the world how great we are. We gave our marketing a mission, though: It should always help people build their careers.

Humans can only handle so many PowerPoints, so we decided to do something different: We made a card game called “SHIP IT!”—a game of product management.

It’s a simple card game for three to five players, designed to help people talk through the various things that happen when you’re making software. You shuffle the deck and draw cards. Cards can be drivers, blockers, or actions. Your goal is to ship three phases of your project. You do this by getting rid of your blockers, collecting enough drivers, and yelling “SHIP IT!”

Drivers move a phase forward…

Blockers keep you from shipping…

And Actions change the state of play

Play-testing

Sure, we did this tongue-in-cheek—but we also spent a lot of time making the game mechanics fun and easy to remember. As we played and play-tested (we like to test things), we had a number of conversations about what makes products work, what cuts risk, and why it’s so hard to make software. So it sparked a good, interesting conversation in the office and continues to do so.

We hope this game sparks conversations of your own, and we’d love to know what you think.

Want to play? Fill out this form and we’ll send you a digital download for print-and-play!

At Postlight we build software for lots of different industries (custom search engines, financial APIs, a birding app for the Audubon society, things like that). This means we hear lots of different people complain about software. That’s my favorite part of the job, because, when you listen to people complain enough, you can extrapolate out what’s actually going on out there in the global software-powered economy.

“We are trying to connect our content to our funnel.”

Here’s what I’ve been hearing:

• “At least before July the whole focus is getting our actual customers to attend the big conference, but you’d have no idea from the website.”
• “We swore a solemn oath that we’d never pass around spreadsheets with emails in them. But we’re always passing around spreadsheets with emails in them.”
• “The CMO now reports to the CTO so that’s weird. And the last CMO was all social all the time but the new CMO wants to know what the hell we’re actually buying and the last CMO is still unemployed so we’re very motivated to solve this.”
• “We built the big database of customer behavior but no one will update it.”

The question underneath this is a simple one: “How do we connect the content to the funnel?” Meaning that companies know how they get customers, and they know how to publish, but it’s hard to put the two together.

There’s a thing that does this!

That’s always true. We spoke about this on our podcast and received this helpful tweet from Andy McIlwain, who pointed out that the term is “marketing automation platforms” and mentioned that there are many products like Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot, and others that let you automate part of your sales process. I’ve spent time looking through many of these products since then, and they’re all good one-stop solutions.

So why are people coming to us asking to spend money to build something large and customized, instead of, for example, signing up for HubSpot? Did they just not get the marketing automation memo?

No. They’d love to just use a service and not build something custom! But their needs are particular to their business. They have a lot of content—20 or 30 interconnected sites—and want to bring all of those onto a single platform in a very specific way. Or they’re a publisher first and need to optimize around subscriptions. And most marketing automation platforms are focused on…marketing. Sales. Taking people from Copper to Bronze to Gold.

Our clients often have a different focus. They need to work relationship management into their products in smart ways.

What is a Funnel?

A funnel is just a self-interested triangle. It shows how you bring people into your world and get money out of them. Increasingly when I go to client meetings, whether it’s media or banking, I find myself thinking, “what’s the funnel here?” Here’s a funnel I just drew, it’s roughly how people come to find Postlight. I live this funnel:

Everyone talks about “moving people through the funnel” but that’s a fantasy in which you control your own destiny. All you can do is say, “hey, if you want to do more stuff with us, it usually goes like this.” And then they go, “okay, let’s get that coffee.” Or, more broadly, “Okay, here’s my credit card, sign me up.” They move at their own pace. You can only show them the path.

What is CRM?

A Customer Relationship Management system is a database designed for persuasion—the software version of a funnel. You put people in the CRM database and then it tells you to do things to them, like send them emails. If they reply to the emails, the CRM keeps track of that too.

There are lots of CRMs, but the big one is Salesforce, followed by Salesforce. Whether you like or hate Salesforce doesn’t particularly matter. It’s called Salesforce because they have forced everyone to use it for sales. There is Salesforce for marketing, Salesforce for small business, Salesforce for not-for-profits, and Salesforce for cats. There’s also ProsperWorks, Zoho CRM, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics, and many others.

What’s a CMS?

A Content Management System is a place to make stuff you plan to publish. If you’re a little company you use Squarespace. If you’re mostly selling stuff you might publish with HubSpot. If you sell hats, you use the CMS built into Shopify.

A tiny number of organizations will build a custom CMS. This is something you spend millions of dollars to build and maintain because you have extremely specific requirements and you need full control over things like page latency, ad network integration, licensing, and globalization. We build these, often in partnership with giant media companies. You almost definitely don’t need one (unless you absolutely do, in which case send us an email).

And then there’s WordPress, the Salesforce of CMS’s. The thing about WordPress is it’s big, it’s everywhere, it works, and it is a very good box into which people can type. Lots of big companies and small ones alike use it to publish. (There are zillions of other CMSes, too, of course. But WordPress is big.)

No heads anywhere!

And finally, everything these days is “headless.” This means that CMSes, CRMs, everything—they don’t make HTML pages for your browser any more. They’re APIs that clients connect to. They produce data, not pages. This means lots of things but the big one is that it’s much easier to smush up two APIs and make something new than it is to smush up two HTML pages.

API is just a fancy way to say “funnel”

So now you’ve taken my CMS and my CRM, which used to be just boxes that I typed into, and made them into APIs. This means we can do all kinds of new things. Let’s say our goal is to get people to come to a big event or conference.

1. Someone visits our website (CMS) and signs up for our newsletter (put them in the CRM) and stays subscribed for three months and opens the email every single week.
2. Should we invite them to a special event? Put the event information on our website with a special link (CMS), and tell only the people who’ve subscribed for three months about it (CRM + email API).
3. Now we know how many people visit the home page, how many of those will sign up for the newsletter, how many of those will keep reading after three months, and how many of those will visit a web page about an event, and how many of those will actually RSVP.
4. So if our goal is to get 100 people to come to an event but we only got 25 to actually attend, we may need to get 16 times as many newsletter subscribers in order to achieve our marketing goals, and they need to be good subscribers who care.
5. So we’d better start rethinking how we’re acquiring subscribers and focus on that part of our funnel.

The upshot is that we can be more strategic. In five steps we went from “get people to come to an event” to “rethink our funnel and change the way we market.”

You used to have to wing a lot of of this using Google Analytics and hunches. But if you connect the CMS and the CRM into one system it can help you understand real human behavior, and change your offering so that it’s more useful and more connected to what people want. And you’ll get a dashboard that’s updated in real-time to boot.

What people are coming to us to do is to wire all these things together: Can you connect an API like Salesforce’s to an API like WordPress’s so we can actually see how people are using our content and give them more customized content, and also build us a dashboard so we can make smarter decisions over the next few years?

Designing a funnel and thinking through your business is a form of data modeling and API design. Your marketing person is probably the best high-level API strategist in your company. They just don’t know it.

Why now?

I’ve been working in and around CRM systems for 15 years and they’ve always been terrible pieces of software. It’s like they were designed to punish salespeople and make them more annoying.

Now, even the CRM is catching up with reality. We live in a world where it’s not just feasible but relatively pleasant—and a lot of hard work, sure—to glue things together if they have well-designed APIs.

Plus, the desire is there to make content work a little harder, and to actually know your customers/clients/members/subscribers, whether there’s a thousand of them or a couple million. And thus the worlds of content and CRM are colliding not just in the stratosphere of Procter & Gamble and GE (they probably just use a lot of Adobe products), but down in the middle market where the rest of us work, too.

My co-founder Rich and I spoke about this very subject on our weekly podcast Track Changes. Give it a listen!

At the end of last year Alejandro de Onís, the Director of Digital Strategy and Design at Knight Foundation, reached out to Postlight and asked if we’d like to create a website that showcased the findings of a forthcoming report.

Knight Foundation is a well-established not-for-profit that supports journalism, the arts, and communities — and that continues to serve as a major source of support for the digital news industry. If there’s an NGO out there that “gets it,” meaning that it “cares about how people are informed in the world and thinks outside of traditional models while also respecting the important social role of local media,” well, that’s Knight.

The report was entitled “How Black Twitter and other social media communities interact with mainstream news” and if you are interested in this world—the world of hashtags, grassroots digital advocacy, and how that interacts with the larger world of the media and how the media reports on different groups of people—it’s a very important document. It was assembled by four researchers: Deen Freelon, Lori Lopez, Meredith D. Clark, and Sarah J. Jackson of UNC Chapel Hill, U Wisconsin-Madison, UVA, and Northeastern, respectively.

To Knight Foundation’s request we obviously said “Yes!” even though the timeframe was tight. Working with them was worth some long nights. And on Tuesday we were glad to see this important scholarship out in the world, looking good.

The excellent Cliff Kuang at Fast Company wrote an article about the report and described our role:

As part of the project, the product-design firm Postlight — founded by coder and journalist Paul Ford with technologist Rich Ziade — created a website for sharing all the results on Twitter. Gina Trapani was the project’s lead engineer. Though she wasn’t a study author, she had to immerse herself in the data. As she points out, “The media uses Twitter to write stories and invent heat, but there’s a disconnect in how the community talks and how the media talks.” That’s a familiar point for anyone who has ever hated a media story, but perhaps for the first time, that disconnect — or media cluelessness, if you’d like — can be quantified and charted.

The Site

The goal: On a tight timeline, make a site that boiled down the findings of this guide into a set of clear, simple statements, something that a busy journalist or interested Twitter community member could browse, explore, and that would motivate them to download the longer report and engage with the findings.

The design: We worked with Knight Foundation to boil the report down to its essence, and then created a card-driven design system that would represent the core findings, encourage people to learn more about work by the report’s authors, share information, and let people explore some of the data themselves. We established a clear type hierarchy and a functional palette—and then just…designed! (Then we shared that work with Ultravirgo, who took it and made it their own with a stunning PDF as the result.)

The data: We munged 44 million tweets into a tiny, portable, hashtag-driven dataset that respected the privacy of individual tweeters (absolutely critical!) while also showing the aggregate relationship between media people and the communities they cover. And it animates!

The Team

First, all credit is due to Knight Foundation’s leadership and to the authors of the report, who put in time and labor to research and explore a vast corpus of public behavior and then, over many months, shine a bright light on a critical problem!

At Postlight, the that worked together to build this product was:

Skyler Balbus, Design

Cody Cowan, Product Management

Drew Bell, Engineering

Darrell Hanley, Engineering

Gina Trapani, Engineering + Twitter advisory

And it was completed with assists from Jeremy Mack, Kevin Barrett, Chris LoSacco, Grace Pelling, Xarissa Holdaway, Matt Quintanilla, and Meredith Franzese (we’re collaborative). And Paul Ford (that’s me!) did some light data munging, too.

If you want to talk to us about the work we did, get in touch! We like to help.

Every week or so someone I know on social media, but not in my daily life, updates their avatar, and suddenly they’re three or four years older than they were the day before. Some of these people I’ve known for 20 years, and it’s happened several times. Sometimes there’s obvious cropping of the picture; a chin once prominently displayed is surprisingly hidden by the above-the-head shot. The hair is gray, or suspiciously lustrous.

Normally, the way my brain works, I’d simply see those avatars change and think about how the Internet constantly brings us closer to death, then leave it at that. But oddly I truly enjoy witnessing the process of avatar aging. There’s always the tiny moment of shock as you see a proto-jowl where before there was smooth skin. Whoa! But I haven’t seen them in years! That’s what happens. The dyed orange hair is brown, or the bushy natural do is replaced by a shiny bald head; the former Adonis has a salt-and-pepper beard and a toddler on his knee. Former bassists may still be wearing overalls but it’s less to be adorable and more about gardening. Piercings are put aside.

Social networks don’t solve for aging. But I’ve got 20 years of email secured away, I’ve been on LinkedIn almost 15 years (5,376 days that I feel in my bones), and I’ve been part of Twitter for over 5 million Twitter years. I have lifelong relationships with Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe. None of these big platforms seem to understand that I’m not 25.

Now this is not the case with other industries, which understand that people are different at 15, 20, 25, 30, etc. Real estate, for example, won’t sell me a timeshare at 15. Media has different magazines for different kinds of people. Health care is keenly aware of how age impacts humans. Even the Beef Council knows that humans have many different beef interactions. Then again, digital products are mostly built by young people. Every now and then they see someone cleaning the campus-office cafeteria and think, “I should get a mentor.”

There are many cultures of software development. Or maybe it’s better to call them “ethos”. The ethos of product design is to create that one, true universal version of a product that encompasses every use case. But the ethos of online advertising delivery is to meet people (or chase them) where they are. It’s infinitely adaptive.

Big platforms seek to be one-size-fits-all, but ad networks know just how likely you are to buy a car, go back to college, purchase a new bandsaw, or buy insurance for your kids. The ad systems are more reactive to your actual life status than the products that make room for ads. It’s oddly inverted. It’s weird that these two systems have to live together in singular experiences. You’d think the products would care more.

I have hundreds, maybe thousands of database-backed social network relationships. And yet I have no sense of this cohort as a whole. What I’m interested in more than anything is growth of the people around me—less babies born, although that’s nice too, but degrees earned, books put aside, decisions made, slow videos of places visited. When I talk to people who work at big companies they say, “Oh we have hundreds of ideas like that. We love that stuff. But the core platform is too rigid, it’s incredibly hard to launch a new feature.”

So rather than expect change, I focus instead on the sweetness of my gently graying cohort. Every week or so I see another avatar succumb to the ravages and it cheers me up—there goes Julie! Another person who decided that being accurate about who you are is important. I think in some way it’s the ultimate and best vanity: I’m still worth a look.

I had a pretty good avatar going, but it was from 2010. I’ve updated my picture, in the spots where I use one. It’s a shame to switch, because I’m fully gray and gained back the weight, but still I want to make sure that people see my life moving along with all the other lives in the Great Big Feed of Humanity.

After 20 years in and out of this business, and despite the havoc it has wreaked upon our culture, I still love software. Nothing illuminates human behavior like watching people use technology in love and hate. And even if I see their faces only in the form of small circular photographs, growing grayer and less lustrous over decades, I still love those people, often more than before.