Any sufficiently advanced organisation is indistinguishable from a protocolised bucket with platform-like spades.

Most organisations stall at the reverse, less advanced model: a single system of record as a platform bucket, worked with protocolised spades.

Examples of protocol bucket, platform spades? Git, with GitHub, GitLab and every editor as spades; email, with Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail; Iceberg tables, with Snowflake, Spark and DuckDB; a folder of Markdown, with Obsidian or any text editor; and the web itself, with every browser as a spade.

Examples of platform bucket, protocol spades? Salesforce, SAP, Workday, Notion and Slack among general business tools, plus endless domain-specific silos. Each holds the record inside a vendor-mediated product, reached through their GUI or API, all on their surprisingly mutable terms.

The truest upside of protocol bucket, platform spades is the effect on complex, coordinated action: its marginal cost collapses. The protocol becomes shared infrastructure, and the last mile is devolved to whichever agent, human or machine, is responsible for it.