Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon Brookes talks Dia Browser on Decoder

I think two things are important to understand. When you get technological disruption, one thing that happens is we all move up the interface stack a level, right? Not a lot of people competing about DOS or operating systems anymore. In the modern internet world, one way to move up the interface stack is to move towards the browser. Features that were inside of applications move to being inside of the browser as we increasingly learn and operate that way. I think second, the biggest thing that's changed and you know, usually people's habits change is what happens. Knowledge workers, yourself, myself, everybody, we spend 80% of our lives in a browser. But we're not reading articles all the time. We are sometimes. We're not reading web pages, we're using applications. We're using Gmail and Google Calendar. We have Slack open. We're using the Atlassian platform. All of our applications and Salesforce and you know, watching videos like Loom and interacting with those videos back and forth. That set of tabs is no longer a set of web pages. It is a set of documents and applications that have massive power underneath them. We're trying to rebuild the web browser in a totally new form for knowledge workers who live in applications, who have their browser open 80-90% of their day as their front surface area and want a better way of managing those applications and getting work done across those applications. The browser has some incredible power to be able to do that. It requires us to understand SaaS apps very deeply, which we do. It requires us to understand enterprise security very deeply, which we do. It requires us to not chase the consumer audience. Chrome, Safari are built the way they are because they have to cater from 5-year-olds to 100-year-olds who are doing less work-related knowledge tasks and are doing more browsing and entertainment and other tasks. That doesn't mean that someone who's a knowledge worker in a corporate job isn't looking at YouTube or Facebook sometimes, but it's not the purpose of their job. So, we believe we can build a better browsing experience, a better work experience, right? One of the pitches we had for the product is we're not building a browser. We're building a doer. Right? It's a totally different thing. We're helping you do things. We're not helping you browse passively. And hence why tabs and split screens and pin tabs and groups and AI and dynamic tab groups, live tab groups as we have of the documents you have is a great example, right? Our documents live tab group in Dia shows you the documents it will automatically open and close tabs if you want to think about it that way for you across any content application. Google Drive, Confluence, SharePoint, any application you use that has documents, if someone comments or shares a document with you, the tab automatically gets opened by your web browser. And if you're done with it somewhere else, it automatically gets closed by your web browser. Because that is a set of documents I'm currently working on. Same for pull requests or anything like this. Then we add AI over the top. AI lets us change how we use these knowledge applications in insane ways. The browser has your entire history of what you've done. It has skills. It has an ability to run AI. Like you can use Dia to make Minesweeper. And you can use Dia to make Minesweeper out of the tasks that you did in the last week. And it'll go start a computer underneath the browser. It'll run a bunch of code generation. It'll create an application for you that plays Minesweeper based on the tasks you have completed in the last week. Now, I don't think that's a very useful application, but the fact that it can do it is amazing. When you apply that to what you can do, so the most popular feature of Dia is the morning brief. People are blown away and often suspicious about how we can understand what you need to do today with a fidelity and a design quality and an experience that makes it a joyful experience when it pops up every morning. Mine opened about 45 minutes ago. That is a design challenge. That is an amazing team of designers that are thinking about our most used application surface area and reimagining it for knowledge workers and for the AI era simultaneously with access to every SaaS application that you have open on your computer in a way that corporate security is going to say, 'This is a good idea and I trust it.' And that is the mission we embarked on a year ago, Browser Company embarked on 3 years ago. And it's usable today. It's coming out on Windows any day now. It's in beta on Windows, GA is very very soon. And it's used on a Mac by a huge number of people on a daily basis and only increasing.