Microsoft Project

Are you

telling me Microsoft Project isn't supposed to take five minutes to open?

I've never used Microsoft Project.

Sorry.

I don't know.

None of that's fundamentally shifted.

Um, and for anybody in the industry that's worried about technology, it's like me being worried about going from traditional scheduling to Primavera coming out, or Microsoft Project.

Mm-hmm.

Or if I was an architect or a draftsman going from pen and paper to the CAD way of doing it, now the 3D modeling way.

That's like step one.

But at some point, you got to be like, you know what? This is better than Microsoft Project, which was the original enemy of 37signals, right? So they were fed up with Microsoft Project.

And they're like, you know what? We're going into this space and we're going to have the best product for people like us.

We're going to...

Point our target at Microsoft Project and say, that's the enemy.

We're picking a fight with them and we think we're better.

And I think that kind of energy, like if you don't think you're better, I

So, so briefly, it's fairly self-explanatory from the terminology, right? But this gradation in skills from the perishable ones, they super-duper matter right now, right? But we can expect that particular skill set, like knowing all of...

Being a super user of Microsoft Project is a great example, right? Of this, the whole system is deprecated, right?

Yeah.

And completely evolved.

So we were using, you know, Outlook and you had to use Outlook and, you know, blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff.

And we, It was connected to a Microsoft project, a product called Dynamics, which funny enough, we use at my current place.

But anyway, there they had it hooked up to also to some sort of a CRM and you could look up a client and then you could, there was a part where you could go and look up every email that went in or out of our company to that, to, to, or from that person.

Like, because it grabbed all of the email out of everybody's inboxes and sent boxes and made a copy in there.

It's fairly powerful.

I mean, it is kind of...

Excel and Microsoft Project kind of mushed together.

Yeah.

That's a product that Oracle has made.

There's also a competing product from Microsoft called Microsoft Project and a bunch of other kind of more smaller, more niche products out there as well that people use.

Excel spreadsheets, et cetera, very poor, very poor

substitute.

Yeah.

As a manufacturer, an ex-manufacturing engineer, moved to product development engineer and then project manager when I got my PMP and I was leading a drug delivery combination product, I very much, I think about My line item in Microsoft Project where it said design transfer, that was not one line item.

I mean, we had the master validation plan activities like Yoki PQs, all those different things.

There's a lot there that needs to be in your processes so that that handoff is more than just the signature because otherwise your product is going to fall flat for sure.

So let's talk about how this shows up in the tools.

Microsoft Project renders the critical path in red, with Slack shown as black lines on non-critical tasks.

That's the classic implementation.

Microsoft Project is the heavyweight.

It's expensive, it doesn't run on Mac, and people complain about that constantly.

But when you need full critical path analysis with resource loading and drag calculations, it's still the reference implementation.

Daniel's prompt is really about two things, why these tools are useful and how they show up in software.

The answer to the first is that the Gantt chart fuses schedule and plan into one readable artifact, and critical path analysis computes the dependency chain that determines the finish date.

Then it uses Nextcloud to act as a OneDrive or SharePoint.

OpenProject to replace Microsoft Project.

And Element, the matrix-based Element, to replace the Teams chat.

Yeah, but