👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week’s relentless algorithmic feeds and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
The End of Excel?
It’s as if Bill Gates’s platform line could also apply to an interface paradigm. You’ve won on some essential level if competitors treat your interface as the standard, start building out their ideas assuming everyone already knows how to use your app, and turn the total market for something that looks like your app into a vastly larger one than the market for your app alone.
Matthew Guay—Every
Mapping the future:
Throughout our history, the standardization of components has always enabled creations of greater complexity. If we define economic progress as the movement of our society to ever more complex technological marvels, then progress is simply a manifestation of competition. This impacts all organizations. And this is what we have to map.
Simon Wardley—The Never Normal | 8 minutes
The Ant That Went to Mars:
Technology now makes it possible and necessary for us to act as a coordinated species. Coordinated not through following explicit orders but through the same mechanisms that ants follow: mere exposure to each other alters our behavior. We gather signals about the places we should go to and the tasks we should perform [..] The invention of the internet is nothing less than a biological event. It changes who we are as a species.
Dror Poleg | 4 minutes
🎧 Listening
How Figma Caught Adobe By Surprise:
We had to get to know people; we had to bring in people from the community who could be our evangelists; we had to encourage other evangelists, and we had to listen really closely to what they were saying about what they wanted—even if the entire foundation of the product was not actually what they wanted [..] We were really thinking deeply about the design process and weren’t just some outsiders trying to completely taking their control away.
Carmel DeAmicis—Big Technology Podcast | 58 minutes
How many metaverses?
It is kind of a teleological view that computing moves to more immersive, more immersion, better experiences, more deep and more rich. And, of course, once you got the tech right, it's more immersive, and therefore, more people will do it. It's interesting because clearly, that's not what happened [..] You could look at the progress from TV and PCs to smartphones, and say this is the opposite; a smartphone is much less immersive than a PC.
Toni Cowan-Brown, Benedict Evans—Another Podcast | 32 minutes
Supercharging human performance:
For our children and the next generation, the future should be better, which doesn't mean that it automatically gets better. It requires people to fight against the status quo [..] Fundamentally, leadership is always an argument with the past, and leaders should always try to replace the status quo with something better. If you want to keep things as they are, you're not really a leader.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic—Lancefield on the Line | 39 minutes
🎁 One More Thing
You can find the articles of this Thoughtform, plus all preceding editions, collected in one Google Doc. It makes for a great narration of how digital calmy chips away at the behaviour, expectations and institutions inherited from the industrial paradigm.