I think we are law the old desktop metaphor - but for different reasons. Once upon a time there was a "manager" whose job primarily was to communicate via memo

I think we are law the old desktop metaphor - but for different reasons. Once upon a time there was a "manager" whose job primarily was to communicate via memo with his peers and superiors, and the cycle time for data to pass from his (yes, his) employees, to him, then he processed by him on his desktop and sent out to his peers etc was at least a day usually a week. So there was plenty of time for him to arrange things in a single "document" called a spreadsheet, and maybe update a memo on Wordstar and send that via the typing pool etc etc But the cycle time is now down to maybe hours if not immediate - and if the company is doing its job right in automation terms there is no need for manager to send out his documents - the data is in several warehouses already. The desktop metaphor is as dead as middle management. Want a new metaphor - look at Jupyter Notebooks - that's a layer on top of the existing data - kind of like middle managers were on top of their employees.