The Tyranny of the Marginal User

Companies like Zoom that achieve massive growth and ubiquity lose one important competitive advantage: the ability to focus on a particular user. Recent events have forced the adoption of Zoom for use cases that it was not originally designed for. Teachers struggle to manage a classroom. Game nights with friends feel overly rigid. Working on a proj... See more

Everyone is overloaded with information thanks to the digital revolution, so—the PKM people tell us—we need new software and systems to survive and thrive. So far, so good. I agree with this intuition.

I’d speculate that another factor is the half-life of cool new productivity software. Evernote, Slack, Notion, Roam, Craft, and many others seem to get pretty far on community excitement for their first few years. After that, I think you have to be left with software that serves a deep and hard-to-replace purpose in people’s lives. Muse got there f... See more