alt Hacker NewsSo if the people making the software don’t see their time is up and the people using the software don’t see their time is up, who decides their time is up?
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The need for a functioning digitalised society, because the current one is digitalising slowly, decades behind technological potential, and poorly at that, so it doesn't work; the result is a lethal inefficiency that is making society itself increasingly unmanageable, with a level of social fracture that I fear is irreparable.
Oh, sure, office suites aren't the only cause, nor the main one, but they are a contributing factor. The model of giving a computer to secretarial staff without any training, which is why this software was created in the first place, has now been extended to almost all "office" workers, and well, it's among the causes of our decline.
We haven't worked with sheets of paper, pages, suspended folders (as directories are rendered in file managers on average), and so on for a long time now; it's high time, then, that the modern General Magic, the Office model, stop screwing everyone over. This won't be understood anytime soon, and the result will be a state of affairs even worse than the present.
kkfx it's right. Office users shoudn't need nothing more complex that WordPad and a simple spreadsheet such as Gnucalc. Everything else should be either DTP domain, scientific notebooks instead of crappy spreadsheets with parsing bugs (genomics) and Access instead of SQLite3 and any GUI of choice to place forms in a WYSIWYG way making queries against that database.