this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 95 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Imagine any internet company lasting 50 years.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 6 months ago (3 children)

This is why slack is bullshit. And discord. We should all go back to email. It can be stored and archived and organized and get off my lawn.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (2 children)

It's not Slack's fault. It is a good platform for one-off messages. Need a useless bureaucratic form signed? Slack. Need your boss to okay the afternoon off? Slack. Need to ask your lead programmer which data structure you should use and why they're set up that way? Sounds like the answer should be put in a wiki page, not slack.

All workflows are small components of a larger workplace. Emails also suck for a lot of things. They probably wouldn't have worked in this case, memos are the logical upgrade from emails where you want to make sure everyone receives it and the topic is not up for further discussion.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

memos are the logical upgrade from emails where you want to make sure everyone receives it

uh, email is memos? email is so memos that ibm's proprietary email management solution Lotus Notes calls the transaction "create memo" where outlook calls it "new message".

and the topic is not up for further discussion.

bit rude, imo.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Sorry, email is still better for all of those things. Except the wiki page, of course.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I mean, unironically, yeah.

It's not even that we need to go back to email. The problem isn't moving on from outdated forms of communication, it's that the technology being pushed as a replacement for it is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Which is to say nothing of the fact that all of these new platforms are proprietary, walled off, and in some cases don't make controlling the data easy if you're not hosting it (and their searches are trash).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

all of these new platforms are proprietary, walled off, and in some cases don’t make controlling the data easy if you’re not hosting it

You’ve just discovered their business case. So many new businesses these days only insinuate themselves into an existing process in order to co-opt it and charge rents.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Even then, you get banned from Google for some reason, what then?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago
  1. Don’t use google as your email provider
  2. Keep backups of your email (you can do this on gmail, too)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Microsoft is 49.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah. Technically I'm not talking about Microsoft, as their primary product is the OS and they are not purely Internet-based. IBM, of course, is much older than that and also has some Internet products, as does every software company.

In my statement "Internet company" means a company whose only product is SaaS on the Internet; i.e. someone who, if they went away, their product would disappear with them.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

I guess it is hard to imagine an internet company lasting that long mostly because the hasn't been around that long, it's only been 31 years since it went public. A year later Amazon was formed. I would bet money Amazon and Google easily make it to 50. Along with many many others. A small, not overly commercialized company like slack would be crazy. I wouldn't be surprised if they get gobbled up by a mega Corp as the enshitification continues.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Google is actually the sine qua non of what I'm talking about. I'll concede that it's possible Google as a corporate entity will still exist in 2048 (it was founded in 1998). But Google has undergone such a drastic and dystopian management change that it's almost not even the same company now--

--but that isn't relevant to what I'm actually talking about, which is the products. The proposition that Slack logs would still be around 50 years from now was what catalyzed my quip. Google kills everything it makes, usually quickly. Will we be able to look at Google Reader logs in 2048? Or--even closer to the target--Google Wave logs? Google Podcasts? Google Stadia? (I could go on.)

At the end of the day it was just a quip, but I fully expect the SaaS companies you currently think of as indestructible titans to be on the dustheap of history in 20 years, let alone 50.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't think the actual logs on slack will go away. Just maybe hosted on a different server owned by a different corporation.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

They will live on as AI training data.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Match group (owners of nearly every dating site and app) are very likely to endure 50 years, and they are, afaik, 100% internet company, plug it off and they disappear without a trace

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

fingers crossed!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

And most microsoft products surely can run 50 years with no glitches.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

They were a software for decades before they became an “internet company”.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

IBM is 100, but the Internet didn't exist in 1924, so we'll say the clock starts in 1989. I'm pretty sure at least MS or IBM will be around in 15 years.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

What does IBM even do anymore? I’m guessing they just support all of their legacy products that customers are locked into.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Bought Red hat and is trying to lock down it's users.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's basically an investment fund that runs the companies it invests in, like Alphabet, but with a bigger mix of real estate and finance investments thrown in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What’s a company they invest in?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Themselves. I'm just saying internally they run it like an investment fund. Example: https://medium.com/design-ibm/area-631-what-i-learned-in-ibms-start-up-and-innovation-program-d87ed98f9549