With a postscript on the importance of Slack for the e-discovery community
Eric De Grasse
Chief Technology Officer
7 December 2020 (Paris, France) – Two weeks ago my business partner, Greg Bufithis, wrote a very detailed brief on geospatial technologies and geographic information systems. He and I followed up with a Zoom chat for a small set of clients to go over the various points. Greg published the highlights on his blog which is publicly available here. This topic/area is extremely important for the three main sectors for whom we write: cyber security, legal technology and technology-media-telecom (TMT).
I want to follow up with my notes from the two annual “tech to watch” webinars/Zoom chats from Wired magazine and Scientific American. The most interesting, which relates to Greg’s writings, concerned spatial computing. Jamie Lapham of AnthroTronix (an engineering research and development company that produces human-centered technology) opened with this scenario:
Imagine Martha, an octogenarian who lives independently and uses a wheelchair. All objects in her home are digitally catalogued; all sensors and the devices that control objects have been Internet-enabled; and a digital map of her home has been merged with the object map. As Martha moves from her bedroom to the kitchen, the lights switch on, and the ambient temperature adjusts. The chair will slow if her cat crosses her path. When she reaches the kitchen, the table moves to improve her access to the refrigerator and stove, then moves back when she is ready to eat. Later, if she begins to fall when getting into bed, her furniture shifts to protect her, and an alert goes to her son and the local monitoring station.
The “spatial computing” at the heart of this scene is the next step in the ongoing convergence of the physical and digital worlds. It does everything virtual-reality and augmented-reality apps do: digitize objects that connect via the cloud; allow sensors and motors to react to one another; and digitally represent the real world. Then it combines these capabilities with high-fidelity spatial mapping to enable a computer “coordinator” to track and control the movements and interactions of objects as a person navigates through the digital or physical world. Spatial computing will soon bring human-machine and machine-machine interactions to new levels of efficiency in many walks of life, among them industry, health care, transportation and the home. Major companies, including Microsoft and Amazon, are heavily invested in the technology.
As is true of virtual and augmented reality, spatial computing builds on the “digital twin” concept familiar from computer-aided design (CAD). In CAD, engineers create a digital representation of an object. This twin can be used variously to 3-D-print the object, design new versions of it, provide virtual training on it or join it with other digital objects to create virtual worlds. Spatial computing makes digital twins not just of objects but of people and locations – using GPS, lidar (light detection and ranging), video and other geolocation technologies to create a digital map of a room, a building or a city. Software algorithms integrate this digital map with sensor data and digital representations of objects and people to create a digital world that can be observed, quantified and manipulated and that can also manipulate the real world.
Those of you who subscribe to our TMT newsletter will recall the “maybe-not-all-that-futuristic” scenario described by the Nokia Digital Health business unit: a paramedic team is dispatched to an apartment in a city to handle a patient who might need emergency surgery. As the system sends the patient’s medical records and real-time updates to the technicians’ mobile devices and to the emergency department, it also determines the fastest driving route to reach the person. Red lights hold crossing traffic, and as the ambulance pulls up, the building’s entry doors open, revealing an elevator already in position. Objects move out of the way as the medics hurry in with their stretcher. As the system guides them to the ER via the quickest route, a surgical team uses spatial computing and augmented reality to map out the choreography of the entire operating room or plan a surgical path through this patient’s body. And I say “maybe-not-all-that-futuristic” because Nokia is testing this in Finland and Germany in cooperation with Siemens.
As I noted in numerous posts over the last three years, industry has already embraced the integration of dedicated sensors, digital twins and the Internet of Things to optimize productivity and is becoming an early adopter of spatial computing. The technology can add location-based tracking to a piece of equipment or an entire factory. By donning augmented-reality headsets or viewing a projected holographic image that displays not only repair instructions but also a spatial map of the machine components, workers can be guided through and around the machine to fix it as efficiently as possible—shrinking down time and its costs.
Or if a technician were engaging with a virtual-reality version of a true remote site to direct several robots as they built a factory, spatial-computing algorithms could help optimize the safety, efficiency and quality of the work by improving, for example, the coordination of the robots and the selection of tasks assigned to them. In a more common scenario, fast-food and retail companies could combine spatial computing with standard industrial engineering techniques (such as time-motion analyses) to enhance the efficient flow of work.
Spatial computing makes the hardware disappear. Not physically, but digitally: we only have the output of the machine, nothing else. The trend of making the hardware fade away to let the software take over has been on the rise for a long time. It’s what Eric Schmidt, Google’s then-Chairman, was talking about five years ago when he said that the internet will disappear, computers will disappear – causing a few heads to explode. He was totally misinterpreted. No, our vital supply of cat pictures and men jumping over barbecue pits were not going to disappear. Or our MacBooks. Rather, he was making a useful point about the economics of technologies as they mature. They become so built into our societies and lives that we stop really noticing that they are there. For example, we all use artificial light but it’s really only a century ago that it became something that was common. And it’s much more recent than that it actually became affordable to the point that we simply don’t worry about using it. The light bulb was a noticeable technology until really quite recently. Now we really only note its absence.
So will it be with spatial computing.
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Social media was buzzing over the weekend. Why? Last week Slack sold itself to Salesforce. It had no choice. It was about to be crushed by Microsoft, and frankly I think it will still be crushed by Microsoft. But the deal, which values Slack at $27.7 billion on revenues of $833 million over the past year, was largely been greeted with cheers. Ben Thompson offers a typically excellent rundown of the opportunity here for both Salesforce and Slack and sees some “nervousness” by Microsoft. Ben’s piece is a good read.
But it feels like the end of an era – one where workers gained new power to bring their own tools to the office, and decide for themselves how they wanted to get work done. Slack first succeeded with small teams who wanted to accelerate their work, and was often dragged into organizations by early adopted. But today, waves of consolidation are leaving people with fewer real choices.
The rise of smart phones in the early 2010s brought with it a new surge of workplace productivity tools that made mincemeat of everything that had come before them. Box and Dropbox brought easy file storage and sharing. Evernote introduced the idea of ubiquitous, cloud-synchronized note-taking. Sunrise created a more social calendar, while Mailbox and Accompli reimagined email for the mobile phone.
Slack tiptoed into the conversation in the middle of the decade, and almost immediately became the fastest-growing enterprise software tool of all time. In 2015, just 18 months after it launched, Slack reported having more than 1 million daily users – a figure then unheard-of in enterprise software.
But there are issues: what percentage of Slack users actually use the cloud integration / collaboration / collective memory layers, and what percentage are “just” using it as a good group chat tool? And how far do many “new productivity” tools only work well in small, fast-moving, cross-functional, highly-collaborative and highly tech-literate teams … which is only a tiny fraction of the real enterprise workforce. SAP is better for most people.
The Slack / Salesforce core issue is that essentially Microsoft is willing to give away their CRM and communication platform for free. Just like with PowerBI it will eventually be as good as or better then the stand alone solution and simplify integration with core Office functions.
Because if there’s a lesson to be learned over the past four years, it’s that thoughtfulness and craftsmanship only got Slack about 10 percent as far as Microsoft did by copy-pasting Slack’s basic design. It’s a shame. Most of us love good productivity tools, and most were rooting for Slack to someday become as good as the company was hyped it up to be. And perhaps it still will: like most giants Salesforce has a mixed track record when it comes to the success of its acquisitions, but some seem to be thriving.
But Slack’s struggle to succeed as an independent company sadly mirrors that of many one-time innovators in enterprise productivity. Mailbox died and Accompli sold to Microsoft, where it became the mobile Outlook app. Evernote is a pale shadow of its former self. Of that early cohort, only Box and Dropbox became – and still remain – public companies.
But the reality … and my guess is our enterprise software readers will be on board with this … is that it all comes down to sales. The idea that workers would someday choose all their own tools was always a fantasy, in part because most workers don’t even want to think about their tools. In such a world, the winning app will almost always be one with a giant … er … salesforce behind it. Microsoft had one. Slack didn’t. Enter Salesforce.
As Aaron Levie … Box’s CEO and seemingly on every business talk show last week and over the weekend … said:
The reality with the enterprise is that you can have the best product, but that’s not good enough. You need distribution. And what Salesforce has – they have the procurement officers, they have the finance people. They have all of the apparatus you need to interact with to sell software, and they have it for the top 100,000 corporations around the world.
So the upside story that the Slack/Salesforce deal is good is based on the theory that the only advantage Microsoft has is distribution, and so now they’ve neutralized the advantage that Microsoft has had. All of a sudden, they can actually fulfill the ultimate promise of the opportunity, because they have 10 times the amount of salespeople that can go distribute this thing into corporations around the world.
That’s not to say that the incumbents won’t always face new challengers. But it begs the question for the slew of all the other fast-growing productivity companies of the current moment: do they have a real future outside the arms of a monolith? If not, then the productivity market will become as consolidated as any number of other spaces on the internet, from app stores to search engines to social networks to e-discovery providers. And as our government antitrust regulators begin to awaken after a long period of hibernation, I wonder if they’ll have anything to say about it.
And speaking of the legaltech/e-discovery crowd, whose tasks are more mundane, Slack may be a bit of a mess for collecting ESI, but also a bit of a godsend. Because most companies have integrations with SF, confluence/jira, and social media channels. So there seems to be a significant social graph of a company thru all these layers. As a user, it makes automating tasks easy. As a collector-of-information for litigation, it is equally useful.
