Looking into the Digital Graveyard

It's amazing how much cloud software is heading to the graveyard. Yahoo Notepad, which have been around since the 2000s is being retired. I have notes in Notepad that predate 2010 so it's at least that early. For context that's at least four years before Microsoft OneNote and three before Google Keep. I think it could be older but I'm having a hard time finding a record of Notepad's launch date.

Salesforce's Quip is also on the chopping block. I covered Quip in the 2010s, long before it was part of Salesforce. I liked it a lot and even used it for a real project. It could have become the next Notion, but Salesforce didn't really know what to do with it. They were just into "collaboration" at the time and grabbed something.  This was at roughly the same time that Zoho was expanding, and Google, Dropbox, and Box were adding document-based collaboration. I guess they thought they could get in on that too. It made just about as much sense then as now.

Microsoft Whiteboard just recently died. It's hard to believe that it launched 12 years ago. The Google version, Jamboard, bit the dust a few years back. The whole digital whiteboard thing seems to be done like dinner. At the time Whiteboard was launched, it was tied to the giant screen conference room table project, Surface Hub, that Microsoft was pushing back then. Those were happier times before the pandemic showed us that no one really wants to collaborate in person, especially around a giant embedded screen in a table. 

Frankly, I surprised as many of these have survived as long as they have. The 2010s were the era of collaboration, driven by the notion that if you give people collaboration tools, productivity will be higher.  This was also the age of the intranet, intercompany information portals that facilitated information sharing. Very few of them are still around, mostly replaced by other software. Chat apps first appeared at this time too, though many of them have not survived. Slack mostly won and Teams killed off any of the laggards. There are still some left, but they don't have the market share of Teams or Slack. The same is true of video conferencing which is now dominated by Zoom and Teams.

What the business school types didn't get was that there is a time and cognitive overhead to using many of these products. Checking your email, intranet, chat, and other apps for messages and acting on them absorbs both time and brain share while diminishing attention to any one task. As usual, the market also had just too many big folks chasing the same thing. Why use Quip in Salesforce when I have Microsoft Office 365 or Google Workspace to manage documents? You even have the choice of Zoho, Dropbox, or Box if you happen to hate Google or Microsoft. 

I admit that, at the time, I drank the Kool-Aid a bit. I saw a lot of promise in these new collaboration tools. There was promise, but it wasn't clear which would prove to be the way people want to work together. It got overhyped for sure, but there was something to the idea of being able to work on documents and communicate better. Once again, the pandemic taught us that chatting and sharing documents were a good thing precisely because they could operate offline. We just didn't need twenty choices and "live" collaboration really means desktop video conferencing. 

The next market to experience the shakeout will likely be in the space that Notion, Microsoft Loop, and Jira (kinda) inhabit. These are glorified Wikis whose whole purpose is to bring some organization to otherwise free form information. I'm betting that Microsoft Loop won't survive even though I like it. Jira is heavily tied to the Atlassian software development project environment and Notion is good for general purpose project information sharing. Loop has very good functionally and has the best integration with the Office ecosystem. It just doesn't seem to be making a splash. Much of what it already does is available in OneNote and Teams. It's a Notion copycat and Notion is just a fancy Wiki. As Microsoft moves more of its R&D focus to AI, I don't see it spending money on Loop.

This type of category death is common. I found a blog I wrote back in the 2000s. It talked about not trusting SaaS services because they can just go away suddenly. This is still the same in the 2020s only with more services to kill. 

Keep in mind, this type of product death is different than the one happening in AI right now. That's an example of too many expensive products flooding the marketing all at once. That kind of shake out always happens before the market solidifies. What's happening in the collaboration market is more about killing off the stragglers in a mostly successful market. 

Call it the Hyena Principle. This is the final thinning of the herd. Yahoo Notepad was at the beginning of the migration and products like Loop are towards the end. Now that the migration is almost over, there still a few products for the hyenas to eat before they turn on something else.