Volume 74: The future of creativity will be distributed.

1. What if the office is actually a force of anti-creativity?

tl;dr: Days are more numbered for the office than anyone realizes.

I hated high school. Absolutely and utterly despised everything about it. As far as I was concerned, its single and only redeeming feature was that when I left, I’d have the qualifications necessary to escape elsewhere.

I viewed late 20th-century schooling as being not so very far removed from its Victorian roots: Kids without rights, respect, or trust forced to clock in every morning and then shuffled from one fore-person to the other on the hour every hour until clocking out. This meant school was far less about education than preparing us for a lifetime of taking orders from others. Within this worldview, I preserved a particularly acute disdain for the order-givers known as teachers. As far as I was concerned, the only reason you’d ever consider going back to school as a teacher was if you’d enjoyed it as a student, which meant there was no way you could relate to me because I despised it. It’s truly hilarious how self-absorbed we all are as teenagers. (Never fear, this is not at all how I view schools or teachers today).

Now, why am I talking about this here? Well, like others, I’ve been doing a lot of work recently on work, where it’s going, and what our working lives are going to be like in a post-pandemic world. And what strikes me profoundly are the executives demanding a return to the office versus the employees who don’t want to go back.

They remind me of my teachers from high school.

For the average executive, the office is a great place to be. You hold court to a steady stream of supplicants and occasional hush-toned worshippers, all there to beg for your blessing on one thing or another. It literally is your job, which means the equalizing effect of being reduced to a small box on a Zoom screen that’s the same size as everyone else’s box must be maddening, even if you only realize it subconsciously.

This leads nominally “data-driven” execs to embrace truisms that seem to have little or no basis in fact, like offices being essential for culture building. Let’s be real here; the average corporate office is an absolutely miserable place to be. I don’t think for a second that they’re somehow magically conducive to “culture building,” which, contrary to the talk, many corporate execs seem to have little more than a passing interest in anyway. But it’s also a nonsensical statement to make when Internet culture most certainly exists and is built daily.

In a similar vein, we repeatedly hear that serendipity in the form of randomly bumping into people in open-plan spaces has the alchemical magical power to turn the miserable reality of open-plan working into creative gold. Well, just like alchemy doesn’t actually turn lead into gold, it turns out that offices aren’t, in fact, conducive to greater innovation or creativity either.

Which is absolutely fascinating. I’ve talked before about the talent in the creative services world-shifting not from the advertising holding companies to the consultancies, but from both to independents. Well, if the office isn’t necessary either, then that’s a shift that creates all sorts of opportunities for new breeds of distributed creative businesses to form too.

One of the biggest problems in the creative sphere is a lack of diversity. Not just the obvious diversity, which matters a lot, but a diversity of lived experiences, backgrounds, class, physical abilities, cultural norms, and ultimately, ideas. This creates a kind of stultifying groupthink that inevitably trends the work toward creative entropy and Helvetica in Pastels.

But. If we no longer require offices, then why can’t we instead form groups of the brilliantly talented from all over who can bring together their diverse lived experiences, backgrounds, and cultural realities in the interests of creating singularly more interesting work? More diverse, more creative, and a better culture. Sounds pretty good to me.

So, screw the office. The most creative businesses of tomorrow are going to be distributed.

2. What does Google really stand for? DOJ thinks it can find out.

tl;dr: Seeks employee performance reviews as part of anti-trust case.

Talk to anyone who works at Google or who used to work at Google, and you’ll immediately be struck by the casual arrogance that seems to define the “Googler.” It’s a weird character trait they all seem to take on almost immediately. A kind of taken-for-granted entitlement rooted in how utterly amazing Google is, and thus how amazing they must be for working there or having worked there.

If you’re ever unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of this casual arrogance, I’m sorry. It’s just so very, very exhausting. It’s not that they’re terrible people, in fact I’ve almost universally found Googlers to be quite the opposite. It’s just that this casual arrogance permeates their entire working worldview to the point where they consistently make pronoucements instead of asking questions, and have a terrible habit of mistaking mediocrity for brilliance, because Google.

So, it was no surprise when reading this article in Fast Company about their new flagship store in New York City that I suffered a profound sense of discombobulation. Looking at the pictures, we see nothing more than an extremely beige example of a middle of the road tech-store. Take away the Google logo, and this could just as easily be Optimum, Xfinity, AT&T, or well, any Cable TV provider, really.

Move on from the pictures, however, to the words, and you’d be forgiven for thinking this was some game-changing, rule-breaking, one-upping-of-Apple masterpiece of experiential innovation. What struck me particularly hard was the lead designer saying over and over again that this was an opportunity for Google to physically express what it stands for and that what it stands for is “human.” A stunning disconnect not just from their bland new store concept, but the fact that Google is truly one of the most unambiguously not-human brands out there. Just try screaming “Hey Google” at one of their speakers, or even worse, trying to use their customer service sometime.

This also contrasts with CEO Sundar Pichai, who has claimed that rather than being human, what Google really stands for is privacy, which is just utterly laughable when Google is now pushing back their intended elimination of browser cookies for at least two more years, marking yet another victory for surveillance capitalism over human privacy.

So, what does Google really stand for then? I have absolutely no idea, but the DOJ thinks it will find out by looking at their employee performance reviews. You see, while Google is vastly smarter than THE FACEBOOK when it comes to brand-building, it’s also fortunate that THE FACEBOOK is as terrible as it is because they get tremendous air-cover as a result.

You see, Google is no picnic. It wields massive amounts of concentrated market power. It spies on all of us every time we touch the Internet. It operates one of the most dangerous radicalization platforms globally, and it isn’t afraid to wield its power like a club whenever it feels like it. Oh, and it forced the bland mediocrity of Material Design onto us, because like all monopolists, it just isn’t very innovative anymore, which is also why so many of its products remain utterly terrible.

So, yeah. Google stands for human and privacy. Give us a break.

3. Windows brilliantly turns it up to 11. Few take notice, but we should.

tl;dr: Microsoft (finally) taking the OS fight to Apple & Google

Almost 12 years ago, while pitching Microsoft on what they should do with the Microsoft brand, we made a recommendation that they should make a very public commitment to privacy as a means of overtly separating themselves from Google. The rationale was simple - at the time, only a small amount of Microsoft revenue was dependent on surveillance advertising, whereas all of Google’s was. Now, while we won the pitch, Microsoft never did implement that change, leaving Apple to use it as a means of overtly standing out against THE FACEBOOK many years later.

However, in the recently released Windows 11, Microsoft has taken a page out of the ‘differentiating at a business model level’ book to do two things - first, open up the Windows app store in a way that means developers have to pay little or nothing to participate, unlike the 15-30% cut demanded by both Apple and Google. Second, they opened the OS up to Android apps via a deal with Amazon that provides access to their app store.

Here’s why these two moves are brilliant. First, shifting the pricing model of the Windows app store puts huge pressure on both Apple and Google when both are facing considerable anti-trust attention relative to their app store policies, positioning Microsoft as the pro-developer, pro-consumer choice in the process. Similarly, opening Windows to Android apps demonstrates that OS inter-operability is entirely possible, which positions Microsoft as the developer and consumer champion while at the same time solving a particular problem they face, which is a paucity of mobile-specific apps for the increasingly tablet enabled universe of PCs.

Now, it would be easy to dismiss Windows as yesterday’s news, but you’d be wrong to do so. While its market share has declined over recent years, it still represents almost a third of the global OS market across all device types. To put this into context, Windows lags only Android globally and is on twice as many devices as Apple’s iOS. So any change to Windows is going to be a huge deal. And changing Windows in these particular ways is a deliberate move that puts both Apple and Google on notice.

In an ideal world, all of the big tech firms, including Microsoft, would be broken up so that we could supercharge the economy with innovation, growth, and economic dynamism. But, since that looks like an increasingly unlikely outcome, it’s a good thing to see one of the big tech firms taking it to the others. In this case, competition is good. And forcing the likes of Apple and Google to play defense on their App Store policies is very good.

Good play, Microsoft.