Content is at the peak of unbundled, and there doesn’t seem to be any solution in sight. Why can’t there be a platform that everyone likes?
Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape, said there are “only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle, the other is to unbundle.”
Content is currently at the peak of unbundled, and knowledge worker productivity is suffering because of it. Marketing emails, newsletters, podcasts, and old-fashioned news are all competing for mindshare. Companies vie for user time via email, text, and social. Now more than ever, the line between communications channels for leisure and professional use have blurred to the point of nonexistence. The productivity tools that promise to help us organize exploding amounts of content are similarly numerous, and blend together through use of similar marketing language and design.
Amidst this battery of content and the hundreds of services that want to help people organize it, I am increasingly drawn in by the simple promise of analog. David Sax calls this, “the revenge of analog” and wrote an eponymous book on the topic. In the above-linked article, Sax states, “The original Moleskine journal was launched in Milan, in 1997… its designer, Maria Sebregondi, told me that she was aiming to create the ultimate travel journal for an emerging class of “global nomads.”
As notifications close in on us, constantly dinging into our consciousness via our mailboxes, laptops, phones, and smart watches, the humble notebook represents the simplest way to aggregate these data streams.
