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Perhaps because mainstream software of today doesn't add much to what we had in 199x. There already were the same Word, Excel and e-mail those days - . (and I d

Perhaps because mainstream software of today doesn't add much to what we had in 199x. There already were the same Word, Excel and e-mail those days - . (and I doubt live chats we have today can add much to productivity, well-thought and well-organized emails are better). It can be possible to boost productivity with something like Roam Research (especially used in collaborative mode) but it would require a lot of enhancements to it and a lot more work on teaching the people to use it the right way. Even people with skills to use Word the right way (i.e. use styles instead of ad-hoc manual font adjustments and extra CRs) or to use non-basic features of Excel are rare. Teaching (or even getting them interested) the masses something entirely new, requiring a new way of thinking and totally new workflow would probably require enormous effort.

datavirtue 5y ago
We had live chat in the 1990s.
crazygringo 5y ago
I disagree completely. I'm insanely more productive as part of a team than I was in 199x. Not even talking about things for software development specifically, but for general-purpose word-processing and spreadsheeting and scheduling, you've got: - Live collaborative cloud editing over mobile. The back-and-forth that previously might take a week can now be done in half an hour while you're in the back of an Uber in a different country - Googling how to accomplish spreadsheet tasks. Stuff that you'd just give up and not do before, or would take you days to figure out on your own, there are tons of blog posts and YouTube videos letting you get it done in half an hour - Tons of scheduling and information-gathering improvements. Looking at people's Google Calendars live to find a meeting that everyone can attend, sending a Google Form to collect lunch preferences rather than contacting people individually, and so on The productivity of modern administrative office tasks has skyrocketed with collaborative, mobile, cloud-based tools. Getting stuff done as a team with static Word and Excel files that were stuck on a physical computer at a physical office while you tried to decipher printed software manuals was slow.
- asdff 5y ago
  On the other hand, for all of these points you could argue you aren't gaining all that much added productivity for the amount of compute power this all took vs the 1990s. - Live editing requires people to be working on the same thing at the same time, otherwise its back to back and forthing as people have different schedules and don't get to things right away. - Google has now gone to shit with basic search terms. Too often you end up in some longwinded article seeking another 10 seconds from you to pay advertizers before you back out and look for another. The web had a lot more signal and a lot less noise in the 1990s. I'd even reach for a book on excel today where I can quickly flip through (or ctrlf a pdf) vs waiting for a 15 minute youtube video to get to the point. - the scheduling improvements have costs, you now have to put everything and anything up on your google calendar lest you be scheduled for a meeting where you are "free" on the calendar but really working on something else. Invites for these sorts of meetings/zoomcalls/calendar events takes places over decades old email. Really the biggest productivity gain would be from going from a printed book to a pdf you could search. Everything else imo is sort of a wash or a massive waste depending on how you look at it with the compute resources being used to run that zoom meeting (that could just be a conference call like the 1990s).
  - xmprt 5y ago
    You're speaking of compute resources like they're the biggest bottleneck and not human time. If something takes 100x more compute resources and it saves me 2x time, then I'm 2x more productive. Sure most of those compute resources are wasted but that's besides the point.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  > Not even talking about things for software development specifically In 199x we had straightforward visual RAD IDEs like Delphi and C++ builder. IMHO this was the pinnacle of apps development productivity, what have now (Electron + a soup of web front-end frameworks) is nightmare, postapocalyptic chaos following the golden age.
  - crazygringo 5y ago

datavirtue 5y ago

We had live chat in the 1990s.

crazygringo 5y ago

I disagree completely. I'm insanely more productive as part of a team than I was in 199x. Not even talking about things for software development specifically, but for general-purpose word-processing and spreadsheeting and scheduling, you've got: - Live collaborative cloud editing over mobile. The back-and-forth that previously might take a week can now be done in half an hour while you're in the back of an Uber in a different country - Googling how to accomplish spreadsheet tasks. Stuff that you'd just give up and not do before, or would take you days to figure out on your own, there are tons of blog posts and YouTube videos letting you get it done in half an hour - Tons of scheduling and information-gathering improvements. Looking at people's Google Calendars live to find a meeting that everyone can attend, sending a Google Form to collect lunch preferences rather than contacting people individually, and so on The productivity of modern administrative office tasks has skyrocketed with collaborative, mobile, cloud-based tools. Getting stuff done as a team with static Word and Excel files that were stuck on a physical computer at a physical office while you tried to decipher printed software manuals was slow.

asdff 5y ago
On the other hand, for all of these points you could argue you aren't gaining all that much added productivity for the amount of compute power this all took vs the 1990s. - Live editing requires people to be working on the same thing at the same time, otherwise its back to back and forthing as people have different schedules and don't get to things right away. - Google has now gone to shit with basic search terms. Too often you end up in some longwinded article seeking another 10 seconds from you to pay advertizers before you back out and look for another. The web had a lot more signal and a lot less noise in the 1990s. I'd even reach for a book on excel today where I can quickly flip through (or ctrlf a pdf) vs waiting for a 15 minute youtube video to get to the point. - the scheduling improvements have costs, you now have to put everything and anything up on your google calendar lest you be scheduled for a meeting where you are "free" on the calendar but really working on something else. Invites for these sorts of meetings/zoomcalls/calendar events takes places over decades old email. Really the biggest productivity gain would be from going from a printed book to a pdf you could search. Everything else imo is sort of a wash or a massive waste depending on how you look at it with the compute resources being used to run that zoom meeting (that could just be a conference call like the 1990s).
- xmprt 5y ago
  You're speaking of compute resources like they're the biggest bottleneck and not human time. If something takes 100x more compute resources and it saves me 2x time, then I'm 2x more productive. Sure most of those compute resources are wasted but that's besides the point.
qwerty456127 5y ago
> Not even talking about things for software development specifically In 199x we had straightforward visual RAD IDEs like Delphi and C++ builder. IMHO this was the pinnacle of apps development productivity, what have now (Electron + a soup of web front-end frameworks) is nightmare, postapocalyptic chaos following the golden age.
- crazygringo 5y ago