In The DIY Personal Productivity Tech Stack (Premium) I discussed how one might take advantage of the boom in new productivity tools, many AI-based, and many increasingly from smaller companies that, to date, haven't been struck dumb with enshittification. To be clear, this isn't a new phenomenon, there have always been alternatives to whatever mainstream apps and services that most use out there. But it feels like we've entered a golden age for productivity tool alternatives. If you're familiar with my work, you almost certainly know I have a certain penchant for wordiness. This is something I sometimes struggle with, and as I noted in the most recent Ask Paul, it's been a problem for as long as I can remember. I would routinely turn in 1000-to-1500 word editorials for an email newsletter I started writing in 1999, and my editor would routinely complain, one time reminding me that they only had to be 500 words in length. At the time, I felt that certain ideas required a certain amount of space to be expressed properly. Today, I'm not so sure. But all I can do is try. I mention that because it factors into what I'm doing here. While writing the DIY article, I was suddenly reminded of a confluence of intertwined ideas dating back to those days of 25-ish years ago. And it occurred to me that this thing I was writing, could head off in a slightly different direction. I had a few choices. I could add more content to the article, making it wordier, something I'm trying to avoid. I could rewrite it so that the focus was more on these new, intertwined thoughts, but that's a tough thing to ask of any writer, and I felt pretty good about the article as it was. So I went with door number three, which you're reading now. A follow-up to the original article, one that heads off in a slightly different direction. This is going to take a lot of words. Sorry. 🔢 Left turn number one: Office I have referenced Steven Sinofsky's book Hardcore Software repeatedly since I first read and then reviewed it one year ago. Indeed, I have re-read this book repeatedly over the past year, sometimes front-to-back, sometimes in reverse, and sometimes to read the chapters that cover specific time periods. On my most recent re-reading, I specifically went back to the time he spent in the Office organization. And while this observation wasn't new to this go-round, what struck me most was how Office had evolved as a product, addressing different markets over time. And it's relevant to the discussion we had in The DIY Personal Productivity Tech Stack (Premium). Everyone probably has a rough idea about Microsoft's progression from developer languages and tools to applications and then operating systems in the early years. And most are likewise familiar with the company's early motto, "a computer on every desk" (which was internally and then publicly expanded to include "running Microsoft software"). Lost to time is that the original vision was for Microsoft ... The post You’re Not an Enterprise (Premium) appeared first on Thurrott.com.