Right. Nothing sets hard limits in a user's mind then guiding them to use a piece of software through a terribly flawed metaphor. My father learned to use computers in the mid-90s when he was in his 60s and his chosen tool was MS-Excel as it most closely represented the ledger system he used to keep his books with (which is of course what spreadsheets were intended for in the first place).
His world turned upside-down when I showed him that he could also do his production planning (he ran a small manufacturer) with it. Instead of painstakingly drawing the production schedule grid for the next day by hand, moving jobs from one day to the next, assigning employees to tasks and machines, etc. Spending 6 out of his 12 hour work day on it. He could do the entire job in an hour in Excel, and it was more flexible and he could make mid-day changes and print the schedules out with just a few minutes of moving cells around.
It blew his mind. He had been thinking of Excel only as a digital ledge, but now he thought of it as a giant grid. Soon he was mocking up purchase orders sheets, tracking suppliers, handling expense reports, doing inventory management, past-job database (with prices and pointers to physical samples in an organized warehouse) and other sorts of probably inappropriate tasks that simply required a grid layout and some basic content to frame the use-case.
What was important was breaking him out of the metaphor and suddenly he found a kind of self-actualization that freed him of hours and hours of hand written paperwork. It transformed his business and allowed him to handle quite a bit more business than he could before. His digital records were so good that when he sold his company he figures that it added 20-30% to the asking price for the company. If Excel has been even more skeuomorphic of a book keeping ledger, with stitched binding and a traditional two or three column ledger, he may never have been able to break free of that metaphor and realize his other efficiencies.
http://chestofbooks.com/finance/banking/Money-And-Banking-Ho...