For those trying to work out an alternative, I've found OnlyOffice desktop to be pretty good – it's quite similar to the Microsoft products, and fully compatible, but free.
That's specifically what I'm working on at Unternet [1], based on observing the same issue while working at Adept. It seems absurd that in the future we'll have developers building full GUI apps that users never see, because they're being used by GPU-crunching vision models, which then in turn create their own interfaces for end-users.
Instead we need apps that have a human interface for users, and a machine interface for models. I've been building web applets [2] as an lightweight protocol on top of the web to achieve this. It's in early stages, but I'm inviting the first projects to start building with it & accepting contributions.
Unternet (https://unternet.co) is a building a new, intelligent client for the web. We think a pivotal part of this is an open protocol for rich, AI-native apps, that everyone can build on and implement. We're a new startup, backed by Betaworks and Mozilla, and looking for our first hires.
We're looking for:
* Lead designer (full-time) – to create the next generation of interfaces
* Lead engineer (full-time) – to build the foundations of a new client for the web
* Open-source engineer (full-time, part-time or contract) – to steward our community & open-source efforts
For those interested, I've been working on something related to this, Web Applets – which is a spec for creating AI-enabled components that can receive actions & respond with state:
I think this article misunderstands what productivity is and is trying to achieve.
Productivity is about achieving your goals with as little waste as possible, and getting things done. It's not about deciding what those goals are. That's not a slight on productivity, it's just what the word means.
This article isn't talking about productivity, it's talking about meaning & fulfilment. But the idea that deciding what you want out of your own life is some new thing (a "3.0" as opposed to something humans have been concerned about since the dawn of time) is a mistake.
> Productivity is for other people asking you to achieve a goal
Productivity is a measurement for any work, independent of the season why one executes this work. You can be productive for your own tasks, or the tasks for someone else, it still could be measured and evaluated.
> and you measure this productivity with money earned
No, you do not. Money can be a viable metric, but most often wage and productivity have not direct correlation in most jobs today. This is a typical misconception.
it's not a misconception. Many productivity measurement metrics are very subjective, except for money paid for work.
Productivity is correlated to the job being done, but only under free market competition conditions, and that all participants have similar bargaining power. Otherwise, slavery is highly productive, but the monies paid is next to zero. But you can use the sold-price of the goods to determine productivity, instead of the wages. So money is still a good measurement, even in the degenerate case.
"Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure."
The meaning and fulfillment is given by the metric by which you measure, nothing more. Productivity is basically just a tool, it has no greater meaning by itself.
