The DIY Personal Productivity Tech Stack (Premium)

When it comes to personal productivity, one could go all in on Microsoft or Google, or dive into emerging suites from Proton and Notion. But there's another way, one that can involve these players or not. Thanks in part to AI, there's a growing set of products and services out there that undercut the more traditional offerings. We are suddenly awash in disruption and change.

How did this happen? Simple. It's always happening. It's just that AI is making this natural cycle churn even faster than before.
? To the web!
In March 2006, Google acquired Upstartle, a Silicon Valley startup that had created a web-based word processor called Writely. Then, 7 months later, it delivered a "completely re-jiggered Writely" as Google Docs, alongside a Google Labs project that was renamed to Google Spreadsheets (later, Sheets). And just like that, it was on. Google, which had formalize and perhaps perfected website indexing with Search in 1997 and then revolutionized email with Gmail in 2004, was taking its most overt action against Microsoft yet. What was next? A Google operating system? (Yes! Android arrived in 2008, of course.)

It's easy to forget how different the world was in 2006.

Microsoft was finally about to get past the Longhorn debacle with the release of Windows Vista that November. (And, then again in January. You know what? Let's just move on). And it had just unveiled Office 2007 that March, right when Google acquired Upstartle. Office 2007 shipped in November--and, then again in January, sound familiar?--and you may recall that it was the first version of the suite to include the ribbon user interface while adding the Office Open XML file formats and a workspace called Office Groove that represented Microsoft's first fumbling steps into a more sophisticated way (than email) for workers to collaborate on documents.

But Google and Google Docs would change everything. By democratizing document creation and collaboration on the web, just as it had previously with email, Google was showing us a different way forward. A web-based way forward, one that didn't necessarily require Microsoft or its Office suite. Indeed, I omitted part of the story. Google also announced Google Apps for Your Domain in August 2006, combining Gmail with Google Talk, Google Calendar, and the Page Creator, a website creation and hosting service that was later renamed to Google Sites. Alarmingly, for Microsoft, there would be free and paid versions of this service. And when the paid version, Google Apps Premier Edition, debuted the following February, it included Docs and Spreadsheets.
? Google, start your photocopiers
This was an interesting era. To me, as the Microsoft guy, it seemed that Google was setting out to duplicate everything that Microsoft offered, but usually free and always web-based, or what we would now call cloud-based. This presaged the looming transition from on-premises to cloud, and the battles that would unfold over several years. But...