Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

Re:Why isn’t new technology making us more productive? by gcanyon on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @08:19PM (#31499136)

> performs about the same as MS Word did on a 486 with a floppy

Except (gdocs for comparison) I now can:

1. Effortlessly access the doc on multiple devices, wherever there is cell or WiFi. 2. See a visual history of every change I've ever made to the doc. 3. Collaborate with many other people in real time. 4. Easily incorporate images, tables, drawings, and other files. 5. Compare documents. 6. Use other character sets and emoji. 7. Add, have others add, and review comments.

I'm sure there's more. I don't remember everything about how primitive things were 30 years ago.

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Re:Why isn’t new technology making us more productive? by marginalia_nu on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @08:31PM (#31499219)

Right, but how many things are actually central to document processing?

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Re:Why isn’t new technology making us more productive? by chii on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @12:16AM (#31500546)

> actually central to document processing?

ahh, the no true scotsman style of logical fallacy.

Document processing is not strict nor defined. The features listed in the parent comment are all very useful, and if the floppy disk document processor of 30 years ago could do it, the people there would also find it useful.

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Re:Why isn’t new technology making us more productive? by Dylan16807 on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @06:02AM (#31502422)

Yes they would find it useful, but in terms of productivity what's it worth? For the things that aren't collaboration, it's probably single digits. Real-time collaboration is worth a lot for certain documents, but also you could have managed that on a 486 if you had a modem.

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Re:Why isn’t new technology making us more productive? by dendriti on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @10:11PM (#31499867)

Literally 100% of the documents I process are sent to other people. So collaboration and sending documents are core functionality.

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Re:Why isn’t new technology making us more productive? by Spivak on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @12:00AM (#31500473)

It’s even stronger than you suggest, the actual “word processing” bits turned out to be a vestige of a paper world and “collaborative text editing” was actually the killer feature.

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Re:Why isn’t new technology making us more productive? by fomine3 on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @01:55AM (#31501068)

I wonder why we use paper layout on Word/GDocs despite it never be printed.

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Re:Why isn’t new technology making us more productive? by fieldcny on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @08:45PM (#31499335)

All of it, what do you think isn’t?

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