Likewise, the office typing pool would probably be typing up a manager's hand writing. Ubiquitous typing skills now (at least in theory) should mean that the manager today spends no longer writing their document than they used to, but it comes out of that process already typed.

Ultimately something like MS Office essentially act as captured knowledge. They know how to lay out a presentation to your company standards, so you don't have to. The ideal (although nobody has quite got there yet) is that the tool is so seamless that the user can only spend their time worrying about the important bits - information transfer, in the case of a presentation.

Flight booking tools are now also so easy to use that the overhead for the person actually taking the flight is fairly minimal. That's not to say they couldn't be better, but we're almost at the point where you tell Sky Scanner that you want to travel from A to B on a certain date and it allows you to seamlessly book it. It's taken the place of the administrative assistant, who would still have had to consult you on where and when you wanted to go anyway. (Saying that, having an admin handle flight bookings is still easier than doing it yourself, so we do have some way to come here).

At the same time, this could be an opportunity. Maybe there is some way tools and workflow could be designed to better allow experts to help. For example, the manager is driving power point and the presentation expert is virtually over his shoulder, waiting to help out where needed. And I am thinking of having a real person as the helper, along with any software assistance built into the program.

But I don't know if this would save much time?

Not just superficially -- it is a cost savings, and a net benefit to society. It's the realization that slides can be ugly and still get the point across just as well. And doing my own expenses when everything's charged to a company card takes all of 5 minutes for a weeklong trip.

This means we can free up talented designers to improve mobile apps used by millions instead of presentations seen by ten, or administrative assistants to work where they're most needed, such as in health care.

I also don't know where the author gets his claim that average productivity growth has been negative since 2007 -- a chart here [1] for the US shows it's been positive for 18 of the past 21 years, and the average is clearly positive too. And while there are certainly plenty of theories as to why productivity growth might be decreasing, the idea that it comes from ugly presentations not only has zero supporting evidence, but seems almost laughable.

[1] https://qz.com/946675/us-productivity-growth-was-negative-in...

PowerPoint has a feature that suggests design ideas based on the content of your slides. This is to solve the specific problem of non-designers spending too much time trying to make slides look better:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/About-PowerPoint-De...

I've done years of VBA programming in Excel, struggling to make that horribly weak language do things it was never designed to do. I've just started working with Python, but more specifically pandas. How I got this far in life and never picked it up is beyond me, but now that I finally have, it almost makes me want to cry how powerful and filled with plain old common sense it is. So far, things are pretty much exactly how one would expect them to be in a non-insane world - if you need to do something, it is almost surely there, and likely very close to the form you'd expect it in. Just wonderful software.

With the battle now moving to the cloud, and Amazon being the biggest competitor Microsoft has seen in ages, why is Microsoft mostly just competing in the cloud, rather than competing there and bringing the desktop toolset into the 21st century with seamless integration with the cloud? Why can't I do something equivalent to Jupyter notebooks in Excel, including using Python as the language?

It just seems extremely short sighted to me, but I never hear it discussed anywhere. Does the topic ever come up at Microsoft?

Since I can't comment, I'll suggest this page that outlines Satya Nadella's vision for Microsoft:

https://news.microsoft.com/features/nadella-ignite-collectiv...

But there has been progress!

- Excel already has a native JavaScript API. [1]

- They are seeking feedback on implementing Python as an Excel scripting language. [2]

- It's a little esoteric / proprietary, but the language backing Excel's "Get & Transform" feature, M, is a noticeable jump in power. [3]

Nevertheless, it's still surprising there hasn't been more innovation in the spreadsheet space given Excel's shortcomings. So I'm working on Mesh, a spreadsheet that feels more like a 'real' programming language (because it's just JavaScript). [4]

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/profiles/script-lab/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927132

[3] See, eg, https://powerpivotpro.com/2016/02/reviewlist-generate-create...

[4] https://github.com/chrispsn/mesh

Totally agree on the Power Query thing, if they'd support pandas + power query + embeddable Power BI objects in Excel + seamless integration with cloud functionality (there's still no way to use Power Query in SSIS for goodness sake).

Using pandas in an Azure function and then consuming that from Excel and displaying in Power BI visualizations, all within a nie little wrapper you can email around or whatever would just be a killer app. This is one of the few advantages Microsoft has over the Amazons and Googles, I wish they'd take advantage of it.

The syntax in your example is lovely and this is something I've wanted in Excel for a very long time.

EDIT:

There is some interesting 3rd party innovation happening: https://www.xlwings.org/

https://m.slashdot.org/story/334927

In comparison, ugly manager slides in PowerPoint really are a huge productivity boost.

Robert Gaskins' book Sweating Bullets about the early history of PowerPoint history is a fascinating read: http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bul...

When someone wanted to call a meeting, that was another form, then invitations in inboxes (again physical trays on desks) replies, room assigned. Meetings were scheduled at least a week out. The flip side is that you could and did request secretarial support for meetings — someone in the room whose only purpose is to take notes, and who will go back and type up detailed minutes.

I've had plenty of meetings where 15 min in I have to ask "What's the purpose of this meeting?" Or at the end of the meeting, "Ok who was taking notes? No one?"

You can’t fix the idiots who organize meetings and expect them to magically get organized without their contribution, but if you do organize a meeting yourself you can make sure at least those meetings aren’t a waste of everyone’s time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0m5wJRGHEQ

That might be enough hours to make a big difference in a small office/studio.

The first one is where someone presents a slidedeck or does a demo. In this case, the minutes can be rather short, as in "Bob presented a summary of last quarter's sales, see attached slidedeck", maybe plus a summary of the Q&A if there was one. It's not strictly necessary to have minutes in this case, but they are also very cheap to produce.

The second type of meeting is any form of discussion. You absolutely need to do minutes for these to document your arguments and decisions. Everything else is unprofessional.

We also all had day books with numbered pages for all working notes. Signed and dated daily, and when filled, archived.

I always prepare my material in a real text editor, until I’m completely satisfied with the content, before I risk dumping it into PowerPoint or another terrible editing environment. I mean, 99.9% of presentations contain bullet points and it’s still a mystery what will happen the next time I type a key: will there even be a bullet in front of the next line of text, will it just invent a new line spacing different from the previous bullet, etc.?

Then, as if to punish me for having the audacity to save time composing text outside of Office, its Paste mechanism utterly destroys text in ways that almost seem malicious.

I end up having to find and disable so many settings just to restore a reasonable set of behaviors for stuff like Paste (bad defaults).

But what's your problems with bullet points? Powerpoint in bullet mode basically follows Python text editing rules. If you just hit enter, the next line will occur at the same indentation level. The style of the indentation will change if you add enough lines that it starts overflowing out of the assigned area (makes sense). When the cursor is at the start of a line, hitting tab will indent, hitting shift-tab will unindent. When the cursor is anywhere else, tab will act as a tab character.

I think the take-away is that it would be useful if a presentation WYSWYG editor (or any other power-user-oriented program) produced unique and invertible human-editable source code that corresponds to the document. Then the editor would just be a visual programming environment that complements the text programming environment. And it would be up to the user to decide what is more convenient to do in each environment. For example I would like to typeset equations in the text environment, but draw diagrams or play with the layout in the visual environment.

If you don't need to deal with images or anything to fancy, it's worth considering, imo. Since I had it version controlled, someone even sent me a patch fixing some typos, heh.

The message I took from that is that the PC is no longer something of an intellectual space, and Microsoft want to forcibly assimilate you into mainstream garbage.

And now some of the Win8 area remains such as wierd black squared background behind software icon.

Was Windows 7's start menu really so bad? On personal machines, whatever, but games ads shouldn't be forcefully appearing on a tool I want to use for work.

"Microsoft is planning a new “S Mode” for Windows 10 Home, Enterprise, and Pro. This S Mode will essentially lock down any copy of Windows 10 so it can only run apps from the Microsoft Store, and does exactly what the dedicated Windows 10 S operating system was built to do ... Microsoft is reportedly planning to allow Windows 10 Home users to disable the S Mode free of charge, but Windows 10 Pro customers with S Mode enabled on their device will be forced to pay $49 to get access to a full version of Windows 10 Pro."

* which can be booted in VirtualBox from OS which is the way I use it most of the time.

Have you sent bug report? There's "Feedback Hub" app for that. Sending bug report to the VM team isn't unthinkable too.

Yes, I believe some of my former colleagues are on that team.

It's like they own all the computers now and you just accept it.

Many senior managers and staff could be x2-3 more effective. One marketing manager spent all week doing ppt layout for a 10 minute slide deck for the president. Another BU lead spends hours resolving a shipping and receiving fiasco for _one_ package.

When these people do what they're paid for they are really good. But when they get absorbed into administrative tasks they're terribly inefficient.

(Context: Australian IT projects, particularly those for the large banks.)

I get what he's trying to say, but it's really a matter identifying the critical skills needed for your line of work, then building productive habits and killing inproductive ones - nobody said you HAVE to have funny memes in your presentation and in turn waste 20 minutes searching for them. So don't do it and voilà, one distraction less.

This is the information age and being able to filter out superfluous information is a valuable (and neccesary) skill - don't blame external factors, they won't go away. If anything, this is "survival of the fittest" in the modern world.

There is usually a compressive effect where if everyone in the industry is un or under employed unless they're in the top 5%, then only the top people are employed and there's not much "spread" to rank results on anyway. How many companies only hire "top ivy CS grads" or "rockstar ninjas", for example? I'm just saying a bell curve matches reality and enables usable predictions if you're looking at a sample of the height of the entire US Federal Census, but its meaningless if your sample is NBA championship winners. You can't cargo cult 80s era Jack Welch style rank -n- yank the B and C level players if it would be a CYA HR firing offense to have ever hired a non A level player. That's what supply and demand mismatch does to a system. The entire concept of competitive metric result reporting is obsolete.

Even candy crush is an odd example, middle management is not main audience and I doubt they play it all that much in work.

And then again in larger corporations, middle management (the ones that are not part of teams that produce) are what used to be administration. They have zero decision power, know nothing about projects they are assigned to and they are there to produce reports so that programmers don't have to.

I think it works well for basic formatting, but information transfer already becomes time intensive when you’re looking to create something high-end (eg where Message and conceptual design are closely linked)

That said, yes, I see many clients spend significant chunks of their time on creating the ppt compared to how long they need to write down their ideas on paper. (And off topic: the other major corporate timesink i see is time spent in meetings, often because it’s unclear who has the mandate to make decisions, and as a result everyone gets invited)

What happens to your super-efficient workforce of people doing exactly one thing over and over when the industry shifts? It's very similar to code, here: highly optimized processes are hard to refactor.

The world is full of not-sufficiently-explored market spaces, hence the ability of small companies to disrupt large ones, and the growing desire to be agile and use MVPs even at large companies. Specializing to extremes is the opposite, and it will get you eaten in many, many businesses.

  In a modern office there are no specialist typists; we all need to be able to pick our way around a keyboard. PowerPoint has made amateur slide designers of everyone. Once a slide would be produced by a professional, because no one else had the necessary equipment or training. Now anyone can have a go — and they do.

Perhaps this entire piece comes down to being more aware of the things that distract you. The side quests that often start small, but end up consuming large portions of your time.

  In a modern office there are no specialist typists

Who said anything about bureaucracy? It all could be lean and agile - but with tasks such that people could concentrate on the value adding tasks. It seems more efficient to hire less people to do n amount of tasks but what happens when the productivity of those people plunge?

As an extreme example, we in finland use the public health services a lot. Every time I go there, the doctor fiddles about on his computer doing this adminsterial task and that. It would be much more efficient if the doctor had some secretary who could manage the bureaucratic fiddly bits and let the doctor focus on medicine.

You could argue that in an ideal world/society, everyone would just do those few specific things they're really good at/love, and nothing else.

As a patient I don't really care of the quality of the bureaucratic output if the case is one-shot - which most are. So in that instance they could have a drunk monkey punching the computer. What I do care about, is that the doctor could see more of these one-shot patients and just forget the damn computer.

The value the records add, is providing a long term storage for my current diagnostic case. Once the issue passes, the value of those records plunges to zero.

Calling whatever it is, 80/20 principle, tipping point management - not everything needs to have 0.999999 level of certainty. In the one-shot bureaucratic typist thingie 0.9 would suffice. Once the medical issue becomes more prolonged and difficult, added care in the papers section will start to add value (as patient information is logged and tracked, and so on).

On the other hand, since this is a medical setting and we insist training on the secretary, the secretary could add immense value, by just going through the checklists the doctor really does not remember to do. The constantly recurring problem when getting medication is the doctors checking for incompatibilities with the patients physical condition and other medication. From my experience, if there is any underlying condition they screw it up half the time. As an example is a relative of mine with nut allergy and some ongoing medication - the stuff this persons gets described half the time has bad outcomes when combined with either of them. So in this instance the only valuable outcome would have been applicable medicine, and since that was screwed up, the value of output is zero, and the amount of resources used is... non-trivial at least.

Hospitals have solved this by having nurses following in the doctors footsteps with procedure specific checklists - and this saves lives. http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/7/08-010708/en/

And once you pay her those money, is it overall saving money?

The professional secretary I described is a nurse. Also, the non-professional would effectively be a nurse. They just have different duties where the latter would also check-list through the doctors remedies. Note that this potion is not that of non-autonomous robot. They have the right and duty to double check on the doctors performance.

First, costs. Where I'm from nurses are fairly well trained professionals, but have a really low salary. They seem to keep at it. I could imagine a worse gig than GP:s assistant.

In single payer healthcare one should look at the total cost/benefit for the entire economy, not just how to minimize the cost for the single health center.

The cost of bad diagnosis or faulty recipe can be that the time of the doctor visit was completely wasted. Hence, the time used for the visit by the patient was completely wasted. If they need the medicine they need to reschedule - thus the cost doubles not only for the doctor, but also to the patient. And the direct cost is not the only cost. As we are effectively doubling our resource use, now we are clogging the system, and delaying other patients.

And. I don't get it why this needs to cost more. They have plenty of nurses at the health centers, for one accident or the other. They could just change the routines that the secretary-duty nurse gets a call if she's needed at some other place.

Of course, this is me looking at the situation through the lense of the single payer social healthcare scheme. The logic of the situation is probably different elsewhere.

So, we have, the time the expert uses t_e, the time of the secretary t_s, and the multiple of time that the expert will spend on the secretaries task. At high enough multiple of cost it would always be cheaper to have a secretary to do the typing. And, it's not only the wage difference. There is also the cost to the organization for not implementing all of the workload that they could implement, if all of the experts were firing on all cylinders. Especially in public health care these negative externalities can be considerable (I imagine).

The argument often came in the last decade. Everybody could be <foo>. And technically yes, the average smartphone of today has the potential to be EMI + Warner Bros + ... Yet it doesn't scale with the number of users. People did as much if not better with old sequencers or vintage paint programs.

It's rarely the tool that matters.

I regularly think that the world would lose by being flat. You need peak and valleys so you can master and enjoy the complexity of a domain. Having access to everything is akin to the paradox of choice. It's seducive but only on a short term basis.

https://bankunderground.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/chart.pn...

There was an even larger drop in the late 1970s (what caused that?) and the dip started around the time of the recession in 2008 as well which must have had a large impact.

There were very likely many causes to productivity and I'd be curious to see what the major historical drivers predating the modern smartphone/financial crisis era dip.

Women began entering the labor force en masse. Way more employees available = less productivity unless you can invent a bunch of new needs immediately.

The former was a product Microsoft sold to employees on behalf of the company.

The latter is a product Microsoft sells to employees on behalf of the employee (although on the company dime) and which the employees use to protect their job title, against the interests of the company.

These kinds of pivots are inevitable as these core software markets become commoditized. You can only make money off a software product for a decade or so before lower cost competitors will come in and eat your lunch.

Where is the sweet spot, DIY where it makes sense, and delegating to others where that makes sense?

So true. Nowadays, whenever I can, I slap something together using impress.js and call it day. I‘m faster and the result is much nicer.

(Who among us didn't spend an embarrassing amount of time interacting with that little rascal?)

I suspect so. Just a few days ago I found an ASCII version of that troll in a frigging code editor (http://kakoune.org/img/screenshots/screenshot-i3.gif)