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Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . INTRODUCTION here INTRODUCTION I wrote Little Brother in a white-hot fury between May 7, 2007 and July 2, 2007: exactly eight weeks from the day I thought it up to the day I finished it (Alice, to whom this book is dedicated, had to put up with me clacking out the final chapter at 5AM in our hotel in Rome, where we were celebrating our anniversary). I'd always dreamed of having a book just materialize, fully formed, and come pouring out of my fingertips, no sweat and fuss -- but it wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd thought it would be. There were days when I wrote 10,000 words, hunching over my keyboard in airports, on subways, in taxis -- anywhere I could type. The book was trying to get out of my head, no matter what, and I missed so much sleep and so many meals that friends started to ask if I was unwell. When my dad was a young university student in the 1960s, he was one of the few "counterculture" people who thought computers were a good thing. For most young people, computers represented the de-humanization of society. University students were reduced to numbers on a punchcard, each bearing the legend "DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE," prompting some of the students to wear pins that said, "I AM A STUDENT: DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE ME." Computers were seen as a means to increase the ability of the authorities to regiment people and bend them to their will. When I was a 17, the world seemed like it was just going to get more free. The Berlin Wall was about to come down. Computers -- which had been geeky and weird a few years before -- were everywhere, and the modem I'd used to connect to local bulletin board systems was now connecting me to the entire world through the Internet and commercial online services like GEnie. My lifelong fascination with activist causes went into overdrive as I saw how the main difficulty in activism -- organizing -- was getting easier by leaps and bounds (I still remember the first time I switched from mailing out a newsletter with hand-written addresses to using a database with mail-merge). In the Soviet Union, communications tools were being used to bring information -- and revolution -- to the farthest-flung corners of the largest authoritarian state the Earth had ever seen. But 17 years later, things are very different. The computers I love are being co-opted, used to spy on us, control us, snitch on us. The National Security Agency has illegally wiretapped the entire USA and gotten away with it. Car rental companies and mass transit and traffic authorities are watching where we go, sending us automated tickets, finking us out to busybodies, cops and bad guys who gain illicit access to their databases. The Transport Security Administration maintains a "no-fly" list of people who'd never been convicted of any crime, but who are nevertheless considered too dangerous to fly. The list's contents are secret. The rule that makes it enforceable is secret. The criteria for being added to the list are secret. It has four-year-olds on it. And US senators. And decorated veterans -- actual war heroes. The 17 year olds I know understand to a nicety just how dangerous a computer can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has come home for them. The seductive little boxes on their desks and in their pockets watch their every move, corral them in, systematically depriving them of those new freedoms I had enjoyed and made such good use of in my young adulthood. What's more, kids were clearly being used as guinea-pigs for a new kind of technological state that all of us were on our way to, a world where taking a picture was either piracy (in a movie theater or museum or even a Starbucks), or terrorism (in a public place), but where we could be photographed, tracked and logged hundreds of times a day by every tin-pot dictator, cop, bureaucrat and shop-keeper. A world where any measure, including torture, could be justified just by waving your hands and shouting "Terrorism! 9/11! Terrorism!" until all dissent fell silent. We don't have to go down that road. If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified by privacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weird ideas provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause with the kids whose web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lock them up and follow them around. If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech -- not censorship -- then you have a dog in the fight. If you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to tell us the rules, and have to follow them too, then you're part of the same struggle that kids fight when they argue for the right to live under the same Bill of Rights that adults have. This book is meant to be part of the conversation about what an information society means: does it mean total control, or unheard-of liberty? It's not just a noun, it's a verb, it's something you do. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Cory Doctorow (2009). Little Brother. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/30142/pg30142-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

I wrote Little Brother in a white-hot fury

The history of JSON is the history of the people that created it, and what they set out to do with the software they wrote. Douglas Crockford became interested in programming in college, almost by accident. He took some computer programming classes to fulfill his science requirements and quickly fell in love. His first experience was programming Fortran on punchcards, which required diligence and efficiency to do right. It was an experience and a methodology that would follow him his entire career. After bouncing around computer and video game companies, including Atari, in the early ’80’s, Crockford eventually ended up at Lucasfilm, where he met Chip Morningstar. Morningstar was working on something called Habitat, a predecessor to MMPORG games that networked computers together in a virtual world. At the time, there was nothing like it on the market, and Morningstar obsessed over making sure its underlying codebase was simple and robust enough to handle hundreds of simultaneous requests. Crockford helped out briefly on the Habitat project before the two left to form their own company, Electric Communities. Their company was, ostensibly, a startup dedicated to creating virtual worlds on the Internet for people to meet up and chat. They acquired a piece of software called that enabled users to connect to graphical chat rooms and events and acquired some buzz and venture capital in the ramp up of the dot-com boom. The Palace But just like at Lucasfilm, Morningstar and Crockford got swept up in maximizing the efficiency and portability of the codebase far more than anything else. They refactored the program to improve it as much as possible. When that wasn’t enough, they set about creating their own programming language known as E, spun off from Java, which relied on sending messages to execute programs. Palace Eventually, Electric Communities was parceled out into something else and Crockford and Morningstar were left looking for their next venture. It occurred to them that they had become pretty good at taking complex codebases and systems and refactoring and extending them into efficient, robust software. They started a new consulting software firm with that in mind, known as State Software. While working at State Software, the duo began tinkering with the web and, more specifically JavaScript. They wanted to be able to pass data back and forth between a server and a browser (the kind of event-driven messaging that was trivial in E), without needing to fully refresh the page. There wasn’t a great way to do it. So Crockford took an idea that he had first learned from somebody over at Netscape, and embedded a JavaScript object inside of an HTML frame, which then passed a message along to the page. It looked like this: document.domain = 'fudco';
    parent.session.receive(
        { to: "session", do: "test",
          text: "Hello world" }
    ) But that didn’t work. The word was not allowed to be used because it was reserved by the JavaScript language. To get around that, Crockford put everything inside of quotes. Which looked like this: do document.domain = 'fudco';
    parent.session.receive(
        { "to": "session", "do": "test",
          "text": "Hello world" }
    ) And that format, roughly speaking, eventually became known as JSON, a JavaScript-based data exchange format that can be used to package and send messages from a web server. In 2001, Crockford put up a webpage to describe the format, so that others could use it too. Then, in 2002, he left State Software. Crockford would spend the subsequent decade of his career in JavaScript, advocating for the language’s simple understandability. When he wrote a book, he called it plainly . When JavaScript has tried to layer complexity into its specification over the years, Crockford has often pushed back against that. JSON was another expression of that ideology. JavaScript: The Good Parts Years later, when describing the history of JSON, Crockford stressed the simplicity of the format. “One of the key design goals behind JSON was minimalism. My idea was that the less we have to agree on in order to inter-operate, the more likely we’re going to be able to inter-operate well,” he began, “I had a goal of being able to put JSON standard on the back of a business card.” JSON has a few rigid rules. It doesn’t allow for comments. All keys and values need to be quoted. There can’t be trailing commas. But with those requirements, the specification is concise, and parsers are relatively easy for programmers to implement. For the longest time, JSON didn’t even have a version number. There weren’t any extensions to it. But it worked. You really can print the standard on a business card. It looks like this: For a while, JSON stayed relatively small, passed around and implemented as compatible parsers in various programming languages. Each time a new parser was released, Crockford would add it to his website. And slowly, a community began to form around the standard. In 2005, , an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It was a way to describe interactive web applications that leveraged the power of JavaScript. Citing work being done at Google with applications like Google Suggest and Google Maps, Garrett described websites that felt more like desktop applications, that refreshed data on the page and stayed dynamic by periodically requesting data from the server and using JavaScript to add it to the page. Jesse James Garrett gave AJAX a name A wave of Web 2.0 applications in the mid-2000’s rode on top of AJAX technology, bringing new feature sets and technologies to the web. Powered by JavaScript and seeded by the next wave of venture capital, more and more dynamic applications for sharing, storing, and creating on the web were launched. In this new paradigm, applications used different formats to communicate data from servers to the browser: XML, JSON, and YAML. In his original post, Garrett conceded that XML wasn’t a requirement, any format that could communicate data simply and effectively would do. Since AJAX had started with XML—it was in the name after all—some believed it was the only true way to create dynamic applications on the web. Critics believed that as a simple format, JSON couldn’t scale to meet the challenges of high-performance applications on the web. But many people struggled with the complexity and often excessive demands of the XML format. JSON offered an alternative that, after years of gradually growing across languages and frameworks, was relatively widespread and available. A half decade earlier, Crockford had bet on simplicity. And the increasing demands of web 2.0 applications made web developers eager for a simple way to glue them together. Over time, JSON gained more widespread adoption. In 2007, Ruby on Rails added support for JSON serialization to their data retrieval API, automatically enabling JSON for thousands of applications. It was a turning point for the format. Years later, in 2014, JSON was adopted by the ECMA standards body and officially specified. By then, it was already the more popular choice among web developers. And that’s how you got AJAX in everyday use, without the X. Learn your history A twice-monthly dispatch about the web's history, the incredible people that built it, and all the websites, code, and browsers you've never heard of. This post introduced 3 milestones to the Timeline. AJAX Feb 18, 2005, February 18, 2005 Jesse James Garrett coins Ajax (short for Asynchronous Javascript and XML) to describe the use of Javascript to retrieve data from a server and display it on a page without a page refresh. Though the technique had already been in use for some time, Garrett officially codified the methodology. JSON Nov 12, 2002, November 12, 2002 Douglas Crockford launches JSON.org, which describes the data interchange format he and Chip Morningstar had created a year prior. JSON is originally a simple way to communicate data from the server back to the browser, but after the rise of AJAX, it will become a critical alternative to XML. XML Version 1.0 Feb 10, 1998, February 10, 1998 The W3C publishes a specification for XML, a way to structure data readable by both machines and computers. XML is used heavily in web services and allows for web servers and clients to relay information back and forth programmatically. View the Full Timeline Sources "JSON Creator Douglas Crockford Interview." Evrone. https://evrone.com/douglas-crockford-interview Chris Garcia. "Oral History of Chip Morningstar." Computer History Museum. February 2, 2019. https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2019/03/102740486-05-01-acc.pdf "The Rise and Rise of JSON." Two Bit History. September 9, 2017. https://twobithistory.org/2017/09/21/the-rise-and-rise-of-json.html Douglas Crockford. "Douglas Crockford: The JSON Saga." YUI Library. August 8, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C-JoyNuQJs James Newton-King. "JSON Standard Business Card." James Newton-King. July 7, 2009. http://james.newtonking.com/archive/2009/07/29/json-standard-business-card First Published . Here Written by Jay Hoffmann on December 13, 2022.

The History of JSON and the People That Created It

If you’re an old git like me you’ll remember heading to the newsagent, slapping down some coins, and running home to code a game by hand from the pages of a computer magazine into a Sinclair Spectrum or Amstrad CPC-464 in BASIC or machine code if you were ( )lucky. un (if you’re even older then you’ll remember Assembly and punchcards and god loves you for it) Invariably it would never work the first time but for many of us, that was the introduction to software engineering or games development we had. It felt like the golden age of computing, the discovery of turning the words of another language into something magical. Now, frankly, the majority of us are fucking lazy. We want no-code or low-code platforms to do it for us all, we don’t want to learn the hard stuff anymore, to extract every bit of juice from a processor or memory and get our hands dirty . at the lowest levels possible And I think to myself ‘maybe that’s why we need an operating system for the metaverse’. The problem and itch that fails to get scratched are that most metaverse discussions are based on building on existing infrastructure and software principles. We’re creating multiple versions of software stacks based on centralized architectures — everything still sits on Windows for crying out loud. When you look at the landscape and proposed components of the metaverse and web3 you get stuff like this below — I mean, they even call it an OS but it's just a reworked representation of a tired Matthew Ball blog post using some curvy squares. propose and champion an Open Metaverse OS, a completely decentralized set of tools and technologies rather than proprietary platforms that are designed only to operate through standards and APIs. Outlier Ventures We have created a framework to assess and interrogate Metaverses, as well as a toolkit to design alternatives based on principles of user centricity and sovereignty of identity, data and wealth. That’s nice chaps but it’s not an operating system so quite why you used the term ‘OS’ is beyond me. The Outlier Ventures Frankenstack To grow the Metaverse, we will need many new tools and technologies. They will span rendering, compute, XR, payments, tools, projection, volumetric compression, AI, ML, you name it. And the quality and capability of these tools will be key to what’s built and by how many builders. But so too are the rates these tools and technologies require, the extent to which they lock in developers, and ways in which they limit consumer choice and the creation of competing innovations. As the need for interchange solutions grows, economics tends to generate a solution. For example, Disney’s Pixar open sourced its Universal Scene Description (USD) file format to help developers create interchangeable 3D data. Nvidia’s Omniverse platform then uses USD to coherently bring together assets from Maya, Houdini, Unreal, AutoCAD, and more, into a shared virtual environment. Epic’s Twinmotion platform can also be used to import models from nearly any BIM and CAD program, such as Archicad, Revit, SketchUp Pro, RIKCAD, and Rhino, and will then use machine learning and AI to upgrade and integrate them wherever possible and in a matter of minutes. Matthew Ball — Interchange, Tools & Standards Not even Ball wants to get his hands dirty, he’s quite content with throwing as many existing software stacks at the wall and hoping The Force will bind this galaxy of applications together. If you trawl the web there are echoes of attempts where someone has either created and abandoned a project but nothing so specific exists today or has even been mentioned or championed. For a start, if you look at the , not one fits or has been written specifically for the virtual world or metaverse implementation. Already we’re off to a bad start — we’re solely relying on Microsoft Windows, Apple OS, Android, or even Linux all of which were not developed for a truly decentralized future or one where we need to write applications in 4 or even 5 dimensions. list of existing operating systems whatever the name is today (what I mean is, writing an operating system for 3D and the is already limiting the future because you need to account for and then — like the ) “spatial web” time multidimensional virtual machine states Minecraft within Minecraft example At this point, I probably sound very stupid so you’re free to quit here. NewZoo dumps a bunch of logos into a picture in a pleasing arrangement What we have today is Epic, Unity, NVIDIA, ARM, Valve, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple…and the many other companies they’ll eventually acquire and swallow to create toolsets specifically for designing, building, and operating their versions of the metaverse. They’ll all compete to create a set of seemingly open standards but will not want to relinquish their sense of proprietary ownership. Building the metaverse has largely depended on game engines such as Unity3D and Unreal Engine but in the coming years, we’ll see more and more venture-funded attempts to wrestle that control away from just the two or three major solutions. This will also mean that the platforms that every version of the metaverse will exist on will also start to diverge — presently they’re interchangeable and accessible cross-platform on PC, mobile, and console but more sophisticated and potentially proprietary worlds will exist that would exclude one or more platforms and restrict access. Yes, APIs are key to interoperability and the need to use tools across the ecosystem but it won’t be the silver bullet as platforms compete and fragment. . There won’t be one encompassing metaverse to rule them all Much the same way there will never be a single of artificial general intelligence. There will be hundreds of metaverse, spread across a multiverse of genres and types for people to interact, live and conduct business and pleasure in. Not to mention personally owned versions. Skynet But what if, in the future, they all sat on an operating system that was built specifically for the purpose and vision we want to achieve? So what choices do we have available? Linux was released in 1991, it took Torvalds around a year to develop the Linux Kernel from scratch and then build on it so it’s not like we can’t develop a brand new OS from the ground up. is a platform and IDE for Metaverse development that extends the Metaverse to the next generation of Web and Mobile. The IDE allows developers to build and deploy “interoperable, [standards-based] Web and Web3 virtual worlds,” the company has said in a statement. Croquet OS It is a synchronization system for multiuser Metaverse experiences. It allows multiple users to work or play together within a single shared distributed environment, and it guarantees that this distributed environment will remain bit-identical for every user. “Croquet has taken a fundamentally novel approach that makes this as easy as writing local code or no code at all. It has the potential to provide an open, standards-based way forward that leverages the power of the web to create truly independent, interoperable Metaverse worlds” Is it an operating system though? No by the sounds of it. It’s another platform with a few bits tagged on. And it’s probably sitting on one of the common OS platforms already. Things get slightly more interesting with the . The ( ) was a multi-participant shared virtual world online platform. This platform was free and open-source software co-founded in 2004 by Hugh Perkins and Jorge Lima. Open Source Metaverse Project Open Source Metaverse Project OSMP OSMP was loosely modeled on the World Wide Web borrowing ideas from existing worlds such as Second Life, Active Worlds, and There. The project aimed to produce an open-source engine for the creation of streamed 3D worlds, also making it possible to interconnect existing worlds into a single open, standards-based Metaverse. The OpenSource Metaverse Project was created because a strong demand exists, and large developer following, for virtual worlds that allow customization by the player and creation of one’s own worlds. Closed source virtual worlds exist already but we needed a metaverse engine that is flexible, scalable and that we can customize to an extent not possible within individual proprietary worlds. If you’re hearing about this for the first time you won’t be alone, because it’s pretty much gone nowhere much like other previous attempts at building open and interoperable platforms. And this should be a portent if nothing else — because platforms are not the way forward if they’re all built on the wrong foundations. The will and drive have always been there to create an open metaverse and decentralized web, but it remains a hollow and fragmented dream because the base layer is all wrong. Interoperability, for example, doesn’t come from building bridges between platforms, it comes from being there at the root level, deep within an operating system itself. Solipsis — not an OS but it did have something interesting Now, although we’re back to talking about another platform this one was pretty interesting — . Solipsis The central objective of Solipsis was to create a virtual world that is as independent as possible from the influence of private interests, such as server ownership. In order to achieve this, it is based on a peer-to-peer model rather than the traditional server-client one. Additionally, it aims to give users more flexibility in designing interfaces and content in their individual segments of the virtual world. Behold, a decentralized metaverse platform! A centralized architecture cannot lead to a truly self-scalable solution, even with the use of multiple servers. Indeed, client-server architectures lead to prohibitive deployment and maintenance costs when it comes to very large-scale applications with thousands of connected clients. On the other hand, thanks to their self-adaptation features, P2P network overlays have clearly proved to be an effective alternative to powerful servers. So Solipsis was starting to shape up like one of the more credible attempts at building a decentralized and open metaverse as far back as 2008 from an infrastructure perspective. The virtual world is initially empty and is only filled by entities run by end users’ computers. All Solipsis nodes are functionally equal, and no preordained infrastructure is required. This eliminates as far as possible any restrictions on the content or functionality of the world. As far as metaverse platforms go, this comes close. It also had a bespoke navigator, or , which is something that has been specifically discussed within the walls of Lamina1 — a new metaverse browser built for the immersive web. browser It’s still a platform play but as I kept falling down the rabbit hole looking for anything resembling an operating system itself I started to see patterns and threads of what could be built on top of a decentralized OS meant for the next iteration of the web. A leap of faith into the spatial web Leap Motion, for example, talks about a and yet as the article continues it discusses in detail the concept of a instead. truly 3D operating system spatial browser So, we’re seeing platforms, stacks, APIs, and browsers but still nothing that resembles an operating system. There was on my journey of discovery a nice paper about Grid based operating systems, for example, itself. GridOS The work presented here is a first step towards a grid operating system which provides extensive, flexible services for grid architectures. But for all the work done on everything mentioned so far, nothing touches having to build from scratch, building a new kernel for a new operating system. Look at this, just fucking look at how much work we have yet to begin I mean, look at this diagram, it’s fucking scary and yet a bloody marvel at the same time — this is exactly the level we should be starting to think about now if we are ever to realize the promise of web3 and the metaverse. I’ve yet to read anything from a VC that even talks about investing at this level because they know there’s no immediate crypto payoff or 50x in 3 years strategy here. We are talking about developing the fundamental levels of an entirely new set of architectures required for an open and truly decentralized web. And that scares them because it also means something else. Which came first — the chicken or the egg? Or, put simply in another way: which should come first — the operating system or the chip? People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. Alan Kay, 1982 Lamina1 Mission Statement It speaks volumes that not even Neal Stephenson’s Lamina1 whitepaper mentions anything around a metaverse or web3 operating system — it’s either a massive oversight or I’m just bananas. And of course, who would ever want to go up against the Godfather of the Metaverse? It’s fucking blasphemy! The way I see it is that most of these new attempts are driven by OGs who were there 20–30 years ago and don’t have the time nor the patience to want to build something as cumbersome as a new OS, champion it, wait for adoption, build a new industry from it. We’re cutting corners and already this latest iteration of the metaverse feels like the one we had 20 years ago with Second Life. It doesn’t matter if blockchain adds a little extra spice to the infrastructure, or that Fortnite makes everyone wet with anticipation, it’s not enough to save it. Think about it long enough and it starts to manifest an issue. We’re writing software based on the silicon architectures that are available to us right now. This creates bottlenecks that the software has to continually work around because the chips were never meant for a decentralized future. To all intents and purposes, CPU might as well mean “centralized processing unit” where we actually need a DCU — “decentralized processing unit”. But what if we need something different on all fronts to create the metaverse we really want, or free Web3 and build it the way it was meant to be built? New hardware for new software. There’s still money in creating new types of chips — take for example, architecting a new type of silicon specifically to accelerate machine learning and AI. What if in order to create a truly open, distributed, and interoperable metaverse we needed Web3 to be sitting on a new type of hardware foundation too? Graphcore CPUs or GPUs that were built purely for distributed systems or a decentralized web? Grid-processors are different from GPUs for example. Where a multi-core GPU gets its strength from being able to compute lots of data in parallel (SIMD data-parallellism), a grid-processors is able to have each core do something differently (MIMD, task-based parallelism). You could say that a grid-processor is a multi-core CPU. Memory that is architectured purely for grid-based in-memory configuration. , for example, has software something along these lines but what if we gave them a bit of a nudge in a new direction and developed new types of RAM to go with it? Hazelcast An IMDG is an in-memory version of a , except that all nodes of the cluster are typically run in the same data center. This local configuration is done to maintain the expected high performance of in-memory technologies, as coordination of data structures over geographically remote computers can be a bottleneck. data grid Do we then wait for someone to build the chips before we write the software to support them, or write the software and wait for the silicon to be developed to take advantage of it? I mean, I find it funny as fuck that Lego has a bloody embedded operating system for its robotic Mindstorms line of advanced toys but we don’t have one or are even thinking of one for something that’s expected to have a profound impact on the future of the web itself. I’m quite sure that they will say so. ** But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek…very poetic Mr. V, but in all seriousness, if you’re a software engineer and this sparks a fire inside then get in touch. And if you’re an investor who sees the long game and believes in Web3 and the metaverse the way it’s meant to be, then you know how to find me. Because believe me, in either this current generation or the next, there will be someone who is sitting bored in their bedroom after experiencing the latest ̶b̶r̶a̶n̶d̶ bland offering in Roblox and that first line of a new operating system for the metaverse will be written that will redefine the future of the web. And the rest, as they will say, was history. Also published . here

The Metaverse Needs an Operating System

El metaverso necesita un sistema operativo

Le métaverse a besoin d'un système d'exploitation

मेटावर्स को एक ऑपरेटिंग सिस्टम की आवश्यकता है

メタバースにはオペレーティング システムが必要

O Metaverso Precisa de um Sistema Operacional

Metaverse cần một hệ điều hành

元界需要一个操作系统

I’d never heard of before today. Quip Then I read that . Salesforce is buying Quip for $750M Hmm. Oh look, conspiracy theories! Fantasies! Random grabs at an explanation, explanation, other than the bare fact that Salesforce just paid three quarters of a billion for a word processor. Why would they do such a crazy thing? any Maybe because it’s not so crazy. With hardly an actual fact smudging the clear window of my own ignorance, I fired off a response to the story on . But hey, maybe this deserves more thought? Hacker News Cut them some Slack There are basically two significant players in the office productivity tools market right now — Microsoft Office, and Google Docs. Let’s coldly dismiss Google Docs first. Its good features are that it’s cloud-native, and it’s simple. But for power users, it sucks. And Google has shown very little interest in growing Docs as a product. It’s a cheap toy, but a cheap toy does the job most of the time — as long as you’re not an enterprise power user. only MS Office, on the other hand… that’s the most successful enterprise monopoly since IBM invented the punchcard. For twenty years, they’ve ruled the corporate desktop with an iron fist, using Office not only to make hundreds of billions of dollars directly, but also to protect the Windows monopoly (RIP), and leverage other products into the enterprise. But as a product? It’s a little long in the tooth. A lot long. Office 365 is a step in the right direction, but it also makes them vulnerable. They haven’t quite dodged the mobile apps bullet yet, and balancing power use with a mobile-friendly face is nontrivial — and doing it in a backwards compatible way to the knowledge traditions of people who have worked with Office their entire careers is even harder. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are dragons that need a lot of taming and training. A few years back, Slack entered the messaging apps market. That looked completely foolish, a saturated market — which they then p0wn3d like a script kiddie. When I look at the “office productivity tools” market, I think of Slack. Could Quip be a Slack? Could be — if the product is right, and the enterprise sales force is in place to scale quickly — hmm, Salesforce! Big game hunting You know what would look great in the entrance to Salesforce headquarters? A bearskin rug shaped like Microsoft. Salesforce is a top second-tier software company. They are extremely successful — but they’re not (yet) Apple, or Google, or Oracle… or Microsoft. What can they do to reach those rarified heights? Take out one of the existing players. Creating Salesforce (the product) and kicking off the enterprise SaaS movement was memorable, yes — but taking out Microsoft would be . And capturing the enterprise productivity tools market, especially in conjunction with their existing monopoly on sales automation, would be a truly dominant market position. legendary It’s going to be very difficult. But if it works, Salesforce will become the most important provider in the enterprise. That’s how they can enjoy the decades of security that, say, Microsoft has enjoyed. Reality check Salesforce has become a pretty big company. It’s much harder for big companies to innovate. And maintaining the high growth investors expect, when you’re already generating billions in revenue, requires big new markets and big gambles. Is it a way for Salesforce to join the peerage of the greatest software companies? Sure. But it’s also a way to . survive The internet is filled with conspiracy theories now. It’s an acquihire for the CEO. It’s Marc Benioff cashing in on his Series A check. Whatever. I prefer to see it at face value — they want a new, modern office productivity suite to compete directly with Microsoft. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

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