The Undercover IT Correspondent

SHRINK-WRAPPED SOFTWARE

Office productivity? Gimme a break…

Before the advent of the PC, the very idea of inexpensive shrink-wrapped software was impossible to imagine. To start with, there was no mass market of computer users, and businesses rolled their own software. Today, of course, you can pick up thousands of software titles, on subjects ranging from business to pleasure, priced from $20 to $1 000 or more.

Today, on every PC at work, you’ll find those most ubiquitous of shrink-wrapped products, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, each loaded down with so many features that the average user gets by with less than 20% of its capabilities. It’s like having a car capable of doing 150 mph on the highway and you never average more than 30 mph in town. Even so, most of us spend hours every day using these tools to do reports, calculations, charts and presentations.

But really, what are we doing that’s so very important? How did we ever manage before these tools came along? Did we do the same stuff more slowly, or did we do less with manual methods – or did we simply do without certain things because they were not economically feasible? And the obvious question – were we any less productive in terms of what we produced for a given quantity of time and effort? The quick answer, borne out by a number of studies on the effect of the computer in the workplace, is ‘no’. There is no direct correlation between productivity and the use of computers in the workplace. And certainly your average office worker would not be in violent disagreement as he or she puts the finishing touches to a 30-slide presentation that has taken a week to prepare, and which in all probability will have an air-time of no longer than 5 minutes in front of some harried executive. And they call it office-productivity software…

But the biggest coup of all was the way in which the IT industry succeeded in getting us male, white-collar workers to accept doing work that previously was done either by assistants, or not at all.  And we’re talking deeply-ingrained stuff here, like status, office politics and male-female relationships. In order to breach these formidable defenses, the software and hardware industries teamed up and targeted the soft underbelly of male vanity and our boyhood passion for gadgetry. They brought out a never-ending stream of new hardware, software, enhancements, upgrades and features, so that while we boys were comparing the size of our toys, we didn’t notice that our use of these tools was gradually becoming institutionalized.

And for those of us who weren’t into gadgetry, they targeted our minds. They designed the software for maximum dependency, and created a sort of ‘personal relationship’ between ourselves and our computers. So today we have a whole hierarchy of little people inside our PCs to help us: drivers, assistants, managers – even wizards. Then there’s the terminology used, like clients, dependent clients, parent objects, parent-child relationships, etc. It’s like having a shrink on your desktop. Maybe that’s why we call it shrink-wrapped software…

In other words, all that skillfully marketed, PC-based techno-progress stuff by the software and hardware industries was just a scam to blind us men to the fact that for the past twenty years we’ve been doing our own typing! MG

IT EXECUTIVE PHOTO OPS – SIZE MATTERS!

When it comes to technology, some executives are clearly better endowed than others.

When it comes to executive photo ops in the IT press, size clearly matters. Any in-depth article on the latest and greatest project success at Acme Inc will inevitably feature a photo of the senior IT or business executive in charge. But not just any old photo: the standard 1×1.5 inch mug shot is clearly inadequate here and doesn’t convey the right message. That message is all about size and importance, which means the person must be appropriately dwarfed by some technology, the implicit message being – hey, I run all this sh*t and make it work!

Technology is the only allowable backdrop for exec photo shots. Geography, scenery and tourist attractions just don’t make the grade, which explains why you hardly ever see exec photos with backdrops of city scenes or nature.

When it comes to technology, some executives are clearly better endowed than others. For example, you can expect great photos ops for execs working in companies which manufacture or use behemoths like airplanes, submarines or cruise ships. Most of these photos are taken outdoors, with awesome technology as the ultimate prop. I remember many years ago a photo of an exec who even managed to be photographed perched atop the cockpit canopy of an attack helicopter, with the rotor blades just above his head! That was a boy with one helluva toy!

For execs that are less well endowed technology-wise, all is not lost! The standard alternative is to fall back on the computer room filled with lots of exotic hardware. With suitable tricks of lighting and focus, photographers can put together indoor pictures that tell as impressive an executive story as those depicted by the outdoor pictures of the boys with their toys. The usual shot is to have the exec with arms folded leaning against a black mainframe or a huge array of disks. He is suitably stern-faced (no smiling in the computer room), with a Clint Eastwood look that seems to be saying ‘go on, make my day!’

When choosing props in the computer room though, I think these execs are not giving technology a fair deal, so the latest gadgets are getting a bum rap. After all, if we measure technological progress in terms of the accepted criteria of miniaturization (smaller, faster, cheaper), then execs should have been posing in the seventies with minicomputers, in the eighties with PCs, in the nineties with laptops, and today with handheld devices. But no, it’s always the bloody mainframe! And when they don’t have a mainframe, then it’s server or disk arrays, the next best look-alikes (hell, they could even pose in front of the air conditioning unit and we’d be none the wiser – they all look the same anyway)!

There is at least one sector however, where execs feel they never get any justice from the IT press when it comes to photos, and that is the lingerie business. And who can blame them? For example, at that household name of US lingerie, Victoria’s Secret, whatever the IT story, project success or failure, you can be sure that the magazine is going to run a photo of a model from the latest catalogue – or worse, the exec against a background of said model! Regardless of gender, it’s an exec loser’s game – for the man because he appears too feminine, and for the lady because she appears, well… too feminine.

So no matter how technology plays out over the next decade, I think most large companies will always have at least one mainframe in the computer room – it’s the only suitable prop for executives who are not well endowed! MG