I can still see the splash screen.

At my first job, I used GroupWise for email and calendar. I don’t remember a single message I sent in it, but I remember what the desktop icon looked like, and what the splash screen looked like, and I remember that opening it was the first thing I did every morning. 

Software companies have been fighting over where we “are” for decades.

When I was growing up, CompuServe, Prodigy, and later AOL competed to be where we spent time online. Remember the AOL CDs that showed up in every mailbox? Want to find me on Prodigy? Still remember my user ID: DWFH87C. The C was because my mom and dad were A and B.

At work, there were also a lot of examples. Windows was what you logged into each morning, and Microsoft was king of the land grab. Over time, GroupWise gave way to Outlook. One of my former employers tried hard to make Teams the place for chat, files, and everything else in the Microsoft universe. My current job is Slack-first, with Microsoft for documents, and email mostly for outside contacts and calendar invites. I wrote about this sprawl back in 2014, when Slack was the new darling and I needed a separate login for every place a file might be hiding.

When you think about it this way, the last couple of years shouldn’t have surprised us. Claude is just the next place we’re being invited to do work. I used to spend a lot of time on Google searching for things. Then I started asking Claude instead of searching. That happened in a browser tab, so it didn’t feel like much of a change. Then Claude moved to my desktop. Then it stopped being about search. The other day a colleague sent me an artifact hosted in Claude, and I edited it and left notes right there. Not in Microsoft. Not in Google Docs.

It’s like hosting a party in a big house with a formal living room, but recognizing that very few forces in the universe are stronger than the pull of party guests to a kitchen counter.

A killer app used to be the reason you opened your laptop, like Figma for design. Now Claude can do that, so we go to Figma less. Recently I saw that Claude can connect to Plaid, so I can choose not to log in to my bank or a budgeting app. My email, my calendar, and my to-do list are all connected, and sometimes I ask Claude for something in Slack rather than leaving that environment and going there myself.

In other words, each of those used to be a place I went. Now they’re things I ask for, from one place.

That’s the part that gives me pause. In the late ’90s the Internet search business was dominated by Yahoo and AltaVista, and Google felt like the scrappy, technical alternative. Its motto was literally “Don’t be evil.” Then somewhere along the way it got very big. Everyone used Chrome, everyone searched on Google, and everyone I knew got a Gmail address. Then over time, we all started feeling like Google was doing creepy things to our data. DuckDuckGo built a whole business on being the alternative to the alternative, although it is hard for many of us to disengage from Google. Who wants a new email address?

So is this what happens when one platform becomes the place for everything? (Nothing personal, Claude.) I’m struggling to think of a time that’s worked out. Apple might be the closest: everything just works, as long as you stay inside. But the whole right to repair fight suggests plenty of people feel locked in rather than at home.

Meanwhile, I wrote this post about the ramifications of work shifting into Claude… in Claude. I’m aware.