The "unbundling" of Microsoft Office and Google Workspace has been one of the most important tech trends of the past decade.
Elegant, best-in-class products have won with product-led, bottom-up go-to-market motions.
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1/ In 1990, Microsoft reinvented work productivity tools with its Office suite.
In the 30 years since, Office has grown to 1.2 billion workers. Once-groundbreaking products like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint have become synonymous with knowledge work.
2/ In 2006, Google launched G Suite (now called Google Workspace).
Google Docs, Sheets, etc. reinvented work again by introducing real-time cloud collaboration.
How Google squandered its lead in productivity / collaboration tools I will never understand 🤦♂️
3/ Over the past decade, beautiful and consumer-like products like @NotionHQ, @figmadesign, and @Pitch have won over workers. They've eschewed traditional top-down enterprise sales (initially) in favor of product-led, bottom-up growth.
4/ Microsoft Office and Google Workspace were always horizontal tools for all knowledge workers.
Now we're seeing tools purpose-built for different functions.
6/ The future of work is real-time, collaborative, design-first, and bottom-up.
The 1.2 billion workers using Microsoft Office will choose the best and most consumer-friendly tools in the market, with each job function getting its own purpose-built tool.
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Taylor Swift's Eras tour is set to make her the highest-grossing female artist of all time.
I've been thinking a lot about Taylor Swift as a businesswoman.
Let me geek out for a minute about Swift and what we can learn from her:
First, it's no secret I'm a massive Taylor Swift fan. Billy Joel said it best when he called her "The Beatles of her generation."
This is partly an excuse for me to write about my favorite artist. But you also don't have to be a fan to appreciate Swift as a savvy businesswoman:
Taylor Swift is only 33, but she's already the only woman to win three Grammys for Album of the Year.
She holds the record for most songs to ever chart on the Billboard Hot 100 (188 songs), and last fall became the first artist to own the entire Top 10 simultaneously.
A question I think about often is: is brand a moat?
My answer has always been yes, but the recent deterioration of digital advertising makes the answer even clearer.
Brand is a stronger moat than ever, and that's not a good thing:
1/ To step back, marketing, in its modern form, essentially didn’t exist before the Industrial Revolution.
There was such little product differentiation that it wasn’t necessary. Then manufacturing exploded, and production became cheaper & faster than ever before.
2/ New entrants crowded the market & marketing became essential.
Today, marketing is often *all* that distinguishes a product.
In America, kids as young as 2 can recognize brands on shelves, and by age 10 kids have recognition of 300 to 400 brands.
1/ One interesting shift: the globalization of culture.
From 2017 to 2022, 47 of the 50 most-streamed songs in the world were in English. But that dominance is slipping.
In India, Indonesia, & Korea, the share of English-language tracks has fallen from 52% to 31%.
2/ In Spain and LatAm, the share of English-language songs has slipped from 25% to 14%.
It's the same story on TV: in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, only about half of the most-watched shows are North American. In Japan and South Korea, it’s only 35%.
3/ We see the globalization of pop culture in what audiences are consuming:
• Squid Game (Korean) became the most-watched show on Netflix
• Khaby Lame (Senegalese-Italian) is the most-followed person on TikTok
• Bad Bunny (Puerto Rican) is the most-streamed artist on Spotify
The most powerful trend in tech right now: "The TikTokization of Everything"
How it's reshaping literally every industry:
To back up, there have been two major forces powering tech for the past decade: mobile and cloud.
Mobile facilitated the rise of massive consumer internet companies: Uber & Lyft, Instagram & Snap, Robinhood and Coinbase. Each was founded between 2009 and 2013.
Digital advertising rapidly shifted to mobile in the 2010s, and desktop-era companies like Facebook had to scramble to reinvent their businesses.