The Register published yesterday that Salesforce plans to write Slack integration out of the equation by rolling its own messaging and collaboration app:

Salesforce is trying to tweak the nose of Microsoft Teams and Slack by building enterprise collaboration into its applications and platform in a move designed to make it integral to business process workflow.

In a challenge to existing collaboration tools, Salesforce claims video calls, chat, alerts, presence and comments can all be built into its application workflow using the Salesforce Anywhere app, available across mobile and PC systems.

The idea is that team members can start working together via instant messaging or video calls while looking at the same page within Salesforce – booting out any erstwhile integrated interlopers. The native real-time chat and video experience run on AWS Chime.

The thing, though, is that the feature is not truly needed at all. The existing tools do the job just fine. For starters, when one needs to initiate a conference call to discuss something, the Salesforce ticket is just a secondary piece of the story. Truly, the key is the issue one is dealing with. So, when discussing it with other coworkers, little time is actually spent on Salesforce itself. Most of the time is dedicated to something else. But, when needed, applications such as Slack, Skype or Microsoft Teams work just fine. They do what the user needs. Why bother writing yet one more application and bolting into the existing framework? As one can easily surmise, the idea is not to respond to a customer need at all but, rather, to drown the competition and increase one's own control of the user data for mining purposes. In other words, this is a business need that benefits the vendor, not the customers. The problem, unfortunately, is that we see this all the time lately. It's the norm. Companies choose to increase the complexity of their own applications (and, with it, to also increase their fragility and vulnerability to security attacks) in order to squeeze an extra dime... but always selling the idea as a way to better address customer needs, of course. It's the sign of the times, I'm afraid! {link to this entry}

I didn't try it yet, but I recently came across a Python script to purge your Gmail inbox that could be quite helpful. After all, cleaning up the different Gmail folders using the web interface is quite painful. If anything, the only problem I see is that, as with most scripts these days, one needs to install a bunch of other dependencies to get it to work. My problem is not so much with the dependencies themselves, which are reasonable, but rather with the fact that one has to use a myriad different mechanisms (pip, snap, flatpak...) to satisfy dependencies for many of these scripts, which ends up creating a total system administration nightmare. But, then, a quick search turned out this other document explainiung how to clean up the trash and spam folders using the web interface. As it happens, it may very well be that the script is not even needed... which would also be, incidentally, another sign of the times we live in. Lots of noise. Lots of useless bits. {link to this entry}