Evans: Work software is migrating from horizontal files to integrated workflows
Benedict Evans · 'Digital transformation' - beyond the silly slogan · Jul 5, 2021 · at 11:12
Benedict Evans and Toni Cowan-Brown discuss how enterprise software is evolving beyond traditional file systems and email chains toward purpose-built collaborative tools.
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“One of them is that you go from sort of horizontal model of I've got files stored in some way, and they may be files in a folder on There may be an Excel file, or there may be a Google Sheet document, but it's still a file, basically, and email, and links to email, and email threads, and email is a sort of, you've got this common substrate of email on the one hand, and the file storage system on the other hand, and you've got these documents that move back and forth between the file system and the email system, and email, of course, is basically a file system. It's like a remote, it's like a very, it's a filing system and instead you have Figma Or you have, and you see a little bit of this of Google Docs where you're chatting in the discussion around the docs, but that's a sort of a hybrid, because it's sort of you're discussing, but you're also emailing around it as well. Whereas the idea of something like Figma is, no, you take all, you know, another company that's interesting here is Frame.io, which is basically video collaboration. And so instead of FedExing the disks around or sending people links to the video on Vimeo, and then having a spreadsheet where you list all the issues, And then emailing the spreadsheet. Although, and then somebody says, great, put the spreadsheet on Google Drive, and then everyone can see it all at the same time. It will be brilliant. What frame.io does is it's, no, it's, it actually pulls that into a single piece of software that wraps up all of the tasks of all the people who have to touch that video. It doesn't do the editing. That you still are using Final Cut or whatever you're using or Avid, but the draft that everyone needs to see and look at all the clips, all of that goes onto this. And so you've got this software that pulls the whole workflow together.”
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