Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush

Likewise, the office typing pool would probably be typing up a manager's hand writing. Ubiquitous typing skills now (at least in theory) should mean that the manager today spends no longer writing their document than they used to, but it comes out of that process already typed.

Ultimately something like MS Office essentially act as captured knowledge. They know how to lay out a presentation to your company standards, so you don't have to. The ideal (although nobody has quite got there yet) is that the tool is so seamless that the user can only spend their time worrying about the important bits - information transfer, in the case of a presentation.

Flight booking tools are now also so easy to use that the overhead for the person actually taking the flight is fairly minimal. That's not to say they couldn't be better, but we're almost at the point where you tell Sky Scanner that you want to travel from A to B on a certain date and it allows you to seamlessly book it. It's taken the place of the administrative assistant, who would still have had to consult you on where and when you wanted to go anyway. (Saying that, having an admin handle flight bookings is still easier than doing it yourself, so we do have some way to come here).

Not just superficially -- it is a cost savings, and a net benefit to society. It's the realization that slides can be ugly and still get the point across just as well. And doing my own expenses when everything's charged to a company card takes all of 5 minutes for a weeklong trip.

This means we can free up talented designers to improve mobile apps used by millions instead of presentations seen by ten, or administrative assistants to work where they're most needed, such as in health care.

I also don't know where the author gets his claim that average productivity growth has been negative since 2007 -- a chart here [1] for the US shows it's been positive for 18 of the past 21 years, and the average is clearly positive too. And while there are certainly plenty of theories as to why productivity growth might be decreasing, the idea that it comes from ugly presentations not only has zero supporting evidence, but seems almost laughable.

[1] https://qz.com/946675/us-productivity-growth-was-negative-in...

When someone wanted to call a meeting, that was another form, then invitations in inboxes (again physical trays on desks) replies, room assigned. Meetings were scheduled at least a week out. The flip side is that you could and did request secretarial support for meetings — someone in the room whose only purpose is to take notes, and who will go back and type up detailed minutes.

I always prepare my material in a real text editor, until I’m completely satisfied with the content, before I risk dumping it into PowerPoint or another terrible editing environment. I mean, 99.9% of presentations contain bullet points and it’s still a mystery what will happen the next time I type a key: will there even be a bullet in front of the next line of text, will it just invent a new line spacing different from the previous bullet, etc.?

Then, as if to punish me for having the audacity to save time composing text outside of Office, its Paste mechanism utterly destroys text in ways that almost seem malicious.

I end up having to find and disable so many settings just to restore a reasonable set of behaviors for stuff like Paste (bad defaults).

The message I took from that is that the PC is no longer something of an intellectual space, and Microsoft want to forcibly assimilate you into mainstream garbage.

Many senior managers and staff could be x2-3 more effective. One marketing manager spent all week doing ppt layout for a 10 minute slide deck for the president. Another BU lead spends hours resolving a shipping and receiving fiasco for _one_ package.

When these people do what they're paid for they are really good. But when they get absorbed into administrative tasks they're terribly inefficient.

I get what he's trying to say, but it's really a matter identifying the critical skills needed for your line of work, then building productive habits and killing inproductive ones - nobody said you HAVE to have funny memes in your presentation and in turn waste 20 minutes searching for them. So don't do it and voilà, one distraction less.

This is the information age and being able to filter out superfluous information is a valuable (and neccesary) skill - don't blame external factors, they won't go away. If anything, this is "survival of the fittest" in the modern world.

What happens to your super-efficient workforce of people doing exactly one thing over and over when the industry shifts? It's very similar to code, here: highly optimized processes are hard to refactor.

The world is full of not-sufficiently-explored market spaces, hence the ability of small companies to disrupt large ones, and the growing desire to be agile and use MVPs even at large companies. Specializing to extremes is the opposite, and it will get you eaten in many, many businesses.

  In a modern office there are no specialist typists; we all need to be able to pick our way around a keyboard. PowerPoint has made amateur slide designers of everyone. Once a slide would be produced by a professional, because no one else had the necessary equipment or training. Now anyone can have a go — and they do.

Perhaps this entire piece comes down to being more aware of the things that distract you. The side quests that often start small, but end up consuming large portions of your time.

  In a modern office there are no specialist typists

So, we have, the time the expert uses t_e, the time of the secretary t_s, and the multiple of time that the expert will spend on the secretaries task. At high enough multiple of cost it would always be cheaper to have a secretary to do the typing. And, it's not only the wage difference. There is also the cost to the organization for not implementing all of the workload that they could implement, if all of the experts were firing on all cylinders. Especially in public health care these negative externalities can be considerable (I imagine).

The argument often came in the last decade. Everybody could be <foo>. And technically yes, the average smartphone of today has the potential to be EMI + Warner Bros + ... Yet it doesn't scale with the number of users. People did as much if not better with old sequencers or vintage paint programs.

It's rarely the tool that matters.

I regularly think that the world would lose by being flat. You need peak and valleys so you can master and enjoy the complexity of a domain. Having access to everything is akin to the paradox of choice. It's seducive but only on a short term basis.

https://bankunderground.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/chart.pn...

There was an even larger drop in the late 1970s (what caused that?) and the dip started around the time of the recession in 2008 as well which must have had a large impact.

There were very likely many causes to productivity and I'd be curious to see what the major historical drivers predating the modern smartphone/financial crisis era dip.

The former was a product Microsoft sold to employees on behalf of the company.

The latter is a product Microsoft sells to employees on behalf of the employee (although on the company dime) and which the employees use to protect their job title, against the interests of the company.

These kinds of pivots are inevitable as these core software markets become commoditized. You can only make money off a software product for a decade or so before lower cost competitors will come in and eat your lunch.

Where is the sweet spot, DIY where it makes sense, and delegating to others where that makes sense?

So true. Nowadays, whenever I can, I slap something together using impress.js and call it day. I‘m faster and the result is much nicer.

(Who among us didn't spend an embarrassing amount of time interacting with that little rascal?)