Shrink-wrapped software
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
