Operating System for the Internet?!
Steve Jobs was right.
Steve Jobs was right.
Back in 1995, when Web was only a few years old, in his famous interview he made a number of pretty accurate predictions:
“The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark age… The Web is extremely interesting, cause it is the fulfillment of our dreams…Web is going to be profound in what it does to our society”
He was indeed a genius visionary. By the time he said those words, the Internet was just a murky place of only a few thousand bewildering web-pages (in fact only 23,000). There were only 40 million people with access to it worldwide. Internet Explorer was about to wage its infamous war against Netscape and Opera. And Elon Musk was striving to convince companies to create their online presence.
Want to know what the only thing people could do on the web was at that time? Browsing ie. “an act of casual looking or reading.”
Hence, with this in mind, Browsers –the only medium to access the Web — were designed. Early browsers were simply a window with an address bar to type the URL and a clean white ‘featureless plain’ to load a web-page on an entire screen.
25 years have passed since that.
Today, there are 1.5 billion web-applications and websites with over 4.3 billion internet users. The Web is not a place of a few thousand company web-pages anymore — it’s a major place where we do business, communicate with each other, and have fun.
People are using 10+ apps on a daily basis, an average of 9 social media accounts per person, and 8 SaaS apps per employee.
This is the internet of the modern-day. Those beautiful logos represent the Web of 2020.
So how do Browsers look today? … Well, apart from a very few modifications, their design is pretty much the same: a window with an address bar to type the URL and a clean white ‘featureless plain’ to load a web-page on an entire screen, designed for performing an act of casual looking or reading, aka browsing.
But what we do on the internet is not browsing anymore.
Hence, browsers of 1995 design miserably fail to meet the working needs of 2020 society.
To solve this problem, what you need is not a better browser.
What you need is a hyper intuitive web-application manager with browsing functionality.
What you need is an Operating System for the Internet! That’s where my company Stack comes in.
The Birth, Design and the Masterplan
On a usual sunny day of August 2018, in the beautiful city of Utrecht, the Netherlands, one friend told the other, he had discovered that a personal side project of his turned out to be solving a generic problem for everyone.
Originally a brainchild of Zviad Sichinava, Stack was born with the modest tagline — “tweet-deck for your social apps.” And in less than six months, inspired and encouraged with the feedback received from the Product Hunt community and beyond, it transformed into a very ambitious project of 7 passionate Stackers — creating the very first Operating System for the Internet.
Following the famous quote — “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched it too late” — we released the beta version of Stack in November 2018, and started collecting the feedback.
The primary goal of the initial design was to fix the — infamous “tab hell” problem. And we promised ourselves that if on top of it we could offer fast and intuitive navigation, we would buy ourselves DMT (kidding on this).
Investigating the root cause of the problem, we came to know that the clutter emerges due to the need of using large numbers of web-applications either simultaneously or with rapid succession in a short period of time. On top of this, there is a huge list of additional applications (messengers, social media, e-mails, etc.) that our monkey brain wants to constantly keep in check. Last but not least, who doesn’t like to listen to music while working?
… aaaaand…tadaaaam… welcome to the tab hell! So how did we solve it?
Some of this can be answered by asking two questions:
Question #1 — Have you ever wondered where the heck QWERTY keyboard comes from?
No one knows for sure, because Christopher Latham Sholes, the creator of the very first typewriter, took it with him to death. However, the scientifically most recognized theory claims that, in order to avoid collision of typebars, he decided to arrange on the keyboard the most frequently used two-letter sequences so that the probability of typebar overlapping and jamming was minimized.
Question #2 — Have you ever spotted that quite a large number of web-apps (all social media, news-feeds, and even medium) use only middle 40% of your screen for providing you with the main content?
Most of the time the rest of the space is just a white void.
Using these two issues as a point of departure for the design thinking, Stack emerged with its unique look:
- Allowing users to categorize and group thematically overlapping or most often simultaneously used web-apps together like stacks of cards. And by doing so — transforming the clutter into an exquisitely organized workspace.
- Utilizing almost 2/3 of the blank space of web-apps efficiently, and allowing to divide the screen to unlimited parallel cards of as many apps as users wish to have side by side on one screen. And by doing so — taking multitasking to the next level!
Last but not least, putting stacks of parallel cards on top of each other creates a vertical Spacebar, with each stack like a different floor of a virtual building, introducing the most immersive internet experience up to date.
Users can reposition Spacebar horizontally to the bottom, which gives Stack elegant look of an Operating system of the future, picking up the best of both worlds (Mac and Windows), and augmenting it with smartphone functionality.
This is how your very first interaction with Stack looks like in practice.
By simply clicking the app logos or just typing the URLs, you start building your stacks i.e. groups of parallelly aligned cards.
Feel free to create:
- Stack for social media,
- Stack for messengers,
- Stack for e-mails
- Or one for each of your project
Furthermore, mastering the shortcuts menu ⚡️ which currently looks like a manual for Starship astronauts, gives you the speed that definitely makes you feel like an internet superhuman.
On top of that, Stack allows you to unify and control all your notifications from one place 🔔 synchronize your stacks across all your devices 🔂 and open multiple accounts of the same applications 🎭
And if you want to distinguish and separate your work and private life or different projects even further, you will find Workspaces in the PRO plan.
For more thorough tips and guidelines on how to set up your Stack in less than 5 minutes, so you can feel like a real superhuman, please check out this 3-min read post!
Although Stack currently runs as a fully functioning web-application manager with hyper intuitive design and super fast navigation, there is still a long way till we reach the promised land — the most sophisticated Operating System for the Internet.
As the famous saying goes: “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” And neither giving Stack the final look that we want will be an easy journey. But one thing we know for sure:
There is no other more exciting thing for us to be doing today, than building a product that brings value to thousands of people and has the potential to define how our future interaction with the internet is going to look like.
And last but not least, inspired by Tesla, we do have a very clear (and also top-secret) Masterplan of what we need to do to achieve our goals!
Psst 🤫… Don’t forget, like Tesla’s plan, this is also top secret! 🙃
Thanks a lot for reading our Story.
Want to know more about Stack? Check out our web-page.
