Nothing is allowed to just be a thing anymore. Everything wants to be everything.
Notion wants to be your file system. Slack wants to be your communication layer. Your browser wants to be your desktop. Your note-taking app wants to be your task manager, your calendar, your wiki, your database, your second brain, your personality.
The original sin was the web browser. It started as a document viewer a tool for reading HTML pages. Simple. Focused. Honest.
Now it’s an operating system. It runs applications. It manages windows. It handles notifications. It stores passwords. It syncs data across devices. It has a task manager. It has developer tools. It has an app store.
Chrome doesn’t want to show you websites. Chrome wants to be your computer.
And every other app looked at Chrome’s success and said: I want that.
Notion started as a note-taking app. Good notes. Clean interface. Simple concept. Then it became a project management tool. Then a wiki. Then a database. Then a CRM. Then a habit tracker. Then a life operating system.
Notion doesn’t take notes anymore. Notion manages your existence.(i know people whose existence is operated through notion, yes you, you know who you are.)
And the worst part? It works. People actually use it for all of these things. Not because it’s good at all of them it’s mediocre at most but because the alternative is using five different tools, and using five different tools means five different subscriptions, five different interfaces, five different logins.
So we consolidate. We accept mediocrity in exchange for convenience. We let one app become our OS because the alternative is friction.
Friction is the enemy of the modern software industry.
Every feature that could be its own product gets absorbed into something larger. Every boundary between tools gets blurred. Every specialization gets generalized. The result is a landscape of apps that are all competent and none of them excellent. ( what is the unix philosophy you ask…?)
Your note-taking app can manage your tasks but its task management is worse than Todoist. Your task manager can handle your notes but it does not comes close to Obsidian, a browser can run desktop apps but those PWA’s(progressive web apps) are worse than native. (In some cases might be better ngl depends but anyways..)
Everything is good enough. Nothing is great.
I think this is capitalism’s natural endpoint in software. When every company’s goal is growth, and growth requires expanding your market, and expanding your market requires entering adjacent categories, then every app must eventually become a platform. And every platform must eventually become an OS.
The app that stays focused is the app that gets acquired. The company that says “we do one thing well” is the company that gets bought by the company that says “we do everything adequately.”
Specialization is punished. Generalization is rewarded.
And the user the person who just wanted a good note-taking app ends up with a productivity suite that does twelve things at a B-minus.
My laptop runs Arch (lets overlook the fact that i am on windhoes now and it’s 11 FOR CAPITALISTIC PURPOSES ONLY, I AM A COG TO THE MACHINE). I’ve written about this before. Arch does one thing well: it’s an operating system. It doesn’t want to be your browser. It doesn’t want to manage your tasks. It doesn’t want to be your social network. It wants to run your computer securely (shhhhhhhhhhhh) and reliably.
That’s it.
And in a world where every app wants to be your OS, an OS that just wants to be an OS feels radical.
I don’t want my note-taking app to be my OS. I don’t want my browser to be my desktop. I don’t want one company’s ecosystem to be my digital life.
I want tools that do one thing well. I want to compose them myself. I want to be the OS. I want the apps to be apps.
But that requires friction. It requires accepting that using the right tool for the right job means using multiple tools. It means dealing with different interfaces, different workflows, different philosophies.
It means choosing complexity over convenience.
And most people won’t make that choice.
They’ll let Notion be their OS. They’ll let Chrome be their desktop. They’ll let one company’s ecosystem become their entire digital existence.
And they’ll call it productivity.
This post was written in Obsidian.