Below details the necessary setup for people to work coherently together in a company.
Laptop Setup
I believe M-series Macbooks are explicitly better than all other types of laptops. Unless you very specifically need a certain software (and even then, there are emulation solutions), choose the all-round better option.
The only exception is if you work in government roles in countries where digital software integrity and independence is necessary, i.e. not under the security umbrella of the United States.
There should be a standardized laptop setup and scripts for everyone.
If I could, I would make everyone wear a uniform and eat a high-quality nutrition like a mess hall. It’s more efficient that way.
We would have lay-back chairs for maximal ergonomics.
Control Center
Slack now serves as a primary control center for everything because the movement from large to small-chat like transaction sizes is a predominant feature of the modern economy increasing the speed at which units of information or action can be sent.
Email is too bulky: you have to download attachments, it’s hard to group threads, everything is consolidated into one giant list.
In the bottom left the add-ons for Google Calendar, Jira, etc. help you keep track of things that email or the app’s UI itself may not be able to easily.
julian.digital disagrees, thinks it will be email:
- https://julian.digital/activity/thinking-about-tech/page/2/
- https://julian.digital/2020/01/17/superhuman-the-productivity-meta-layer/
Software Web-linking
The way I best describe development of products across softwares is a bunch self-wrapping mazes. It’s kind of like the Chinese “super-app” concept, except super-app is the wrong word because that implies a fixed hierarchy where everything is a superset of lower-tier features, like a mega Pokemon evolution.
These self-wrapping maze architectures are characterized by multiple ways to do things: you can link to your Jira ticket through Google Meet, then you see a bunch of other links: Slack channels describing what the problem is, a sync between the Jira ticket and the transcript of past meetings regarding this topic, multiple people’s comments and thoughts, a link to a document describing higher-level details and features. You could link to an Opencode AI chat link, which shares how you fixed a problem.
This messy, multiple-way-to-do-things is a feature of resilience in networks. A country where people can only get around one way can be brittle; diversity in foodstuffs, transportation methods, income sources, or species in an ecosystem gives fallback methods in case of blight or disaster.
I probably should also have included digital whiteboards and video screenshare tools in the above. They are essential for communicating thoughts in the digital age.
Internal State
Internal state is necessary because without a recorded source of truth, people will do different things, which inhibits group action.
Many sites use internal document sites such as Sharepoint as a catch-all source of logs, but Notion is also used as a reasonably OK looking publishing site.
Input/Output
Most companies have inputs, and they produce outputs. Inputs may include customer feedback (UserJot), customer support (FreshDesk, Assembled). Better internal organization and integration of inputs leads to better outputs.
The Consolidator and the Coalition
Google is a consolidator, as is the tendency of many Chinese companies. The consolidator doesn’t innovate as fast as a coalition of innovators or market leaders connecting to each other with APIs, which is its downside. It will grow too slowly and die out as vines block the undergrowth from light, or it will try to take on too many things at the same time and de-densify/evaporate.
For example, Atlassian’s BitBucket is falling behind in feature parity compared to Github, with most of the AI tools supporting the latter’s integrations. But it tried to integrate a lot of tools together, such as Jira and Confluence, yet Jira is lacking in UX compared to Linear.
Google on the other hand seems to be a consolidator strategy that works. It can introduce meeting schedulers into its already existing calendar app and wide distribution, skipping the hassle of Cal.com or calendly’s sign-up. The seamless experience between apps is significant. It integrates signatures which are a Docusign thing into Google Docs. By owning the distribution of Google Meet, it then integrates transcripts and recordings into Docs and Drive with auto-translate features, killing the meeting bot companies as well. I believe Google Chat is meant to take on Slack, though feature and design-wise it leaves much to be desired. In time, Google Tasks could even take on Jira and Linear.
Microsoft, despite being an enterprise product, doesn’t seem to be able to innovate as fast lately.
From a whole-systems perspective, having coalitions is a faster innovator overall. If each organization in a system tries to be a consolidator, there will be much wasted and repeated work. However, this coalition or ensemble of separate companies only works if there is a new frontier to develop in, hoping the inertia of old large companies will keep them in place.
Over time, a consolidator may slowly chomp off these smaller companies who may not see the urge to band together being so different from each other. Would Cal.com, Slack, and Linear join forces, or even think to, because some far-sighted person may see the behemoth Google in the distance? Will Google even become strong enough to crush all of them at the same time?