I was pondering the fact that what I charge for my services is about the same of what I charged when I started in the 80’s. As I pondered why I am still in business with this kind of revenue trend, it is primarily technology. I can do things about twice as fast as the 80’s. I go back far enough to remember the first fax machines that had a drum spinning around and toner flying out. I remember copiers the size of rooms and thinking it was awsome that our office PC got upgraded to 10 MB. I can remember the first spreadsheet programs, databases and word processors. I was wondering what you though would be the top 3 most amazing advances in office technology. There are obvious ones like the advancement of the PC. Mine are
Word Processing Software: In the beginning of my career, we still used IBM Selectric typewriter to make documents.
Search Engines: You can find so much info on the net, I almost never have to leave my office. This is both good and bad.
Adobe Acrobat: The ability to move large documents via email and move to a paperless office is amazing.
IMO, besides the PC, probably the single biggest revolution to the office. One spreadsheet can replace a room full of accountants or analysts and turn days of work into minutes.
Word, PowerPoint, AutoCAD save time and are convenient but don’t replace their manual counterparts in the same magnitude as the spreadsheet.
I’ll add my vote to the spreadsheet. Simply astounding.
Also, I’d say the internet, and more specifically open standards and connectivity stuff. I once sat in my living at home, remote desktop-ed into my other computer at work, and reprogrammed a device in Germany in time for a trade show the next morning (German-time). Even a few years ago, such an emergency repair would have required a plane ticket. Or at least a FedEx overnight package, either of which would have been too little too late.
Don’t agree on #3, or at least not the product listed. I think there are a ton of other things that enable the digitization, so I’d say the .PDF format itself is pretty awesome as the underlying technology standard.
WYSIWYG - brought the web to the masses, and is a critical component of a lot of the expansion of content creation
I think I’d list Microsoft in general, with old school Apple as well. I know the first is anathema to a lot of people, but in my exposure to the world they are really the one’s who took the computer ultra mainstream. Apple made it known, and I used an Apple IIe in school because they targeted education and usage by kids. Microsoft created a platform that most people use, for personal and business reasons. And it proliferated most of the things people will list as their favorite advancements.
What about everyone’s LEAST favorite advances?
PowerPoint - Great tool, most frequently abused product in the world. I’ve worked too many places where months of work results in a presentation that results in no action, no change, no decision, nothing.
QWERTY - there are superior keyboard layouts that are more efficient, but it won over (like VHS over Betamax)
Laptops + Overuse = Carpel Tunnel - Laptop keyboards are the devil
The IDE (integrated development environment). It provides instant syntax checking when writing code, integrates the development, testing and deployment processes, and generally makes every task a whole lot easier.
PowerPoint - Great tool, most frequently abused product in the world. I’ve worked too many places where months of work results in a presentation that results in no action, no change, no decision, nothing.
PowerPoint is the death of the original presentation. I don’t know how many times I’ve dozed off as a presenter reads their powerpoint slides to the audience…ZZzzZ
On my last job, we did lots of presentations, and I did a fair share myself.
The powers that be/were, man, they sucked. They were all former engineers, and they wanted the most classically horrific presentations to be given. Basically they wanted to read a Word document on the screen, but in PowerPoint. Nearly every presentation I gave they’d say that I said things presenting the slide that wasn’t on the screen, so I had to add that to the screen. They never got that the slides are the means to present, and that the point of the presentation was for them to listen to what I was saying, not read the words.
Towards the end I just didn’t care what they said, and went to the more recommended styles of 3-5 words per slide, only slides with an image or chart, etc. Lo and behold (!) they started learning more in these presentations.
IMO, besides the PC, probably the single biggest revolution to the office. One spreadsheet can replace a room full of accountants or analysts and turn days of work into minutes.
Word, PowerPoint, AutoCAD save time and are convenient but don’t replace their manual counterparts in the same magnitude as the spreadsheet.
OTOH I read an article a LONG time ago about how MBA’s in the 80’s suddenly could fire up a spreadsheet to do their data modeling and how this eventually led to the recession in the 80s’s.
Worst Two advances - High Speed Internet probably accounts for a 15% productivity loss as workers screw around (slowtwitch) and cell phones which make you available to andyone and everyone 24/7/365.
PowerPoint - Great tool, most frequently abused product in the world. I’ve worked too many places where months of work results in a presentation that results in no action, no change, no decision, nothing.
PowerPoint is the death of the original presentation. I don’t know how many times I’ve dozed off as a presenter reads their powerpoint slides to the audience…ZZzzZ
Here is an example of AWESOME powerpoint… and the content is damn interesting as well.