Ben Evans paints a vivid picture of technology replacing humans in a recent blog post describing the 60s film The Apartment:
In effect, every person on that floor is a cell in a spreadsheet. The floor is a worksheet and the building is an Excel file, with thousands of cells each containing a single person. CC Baxter is on the 19th floor, section W, desk 861. The links between cells are made up of a typewriter, carbon copies (‘CC’) and an internal mail system, and it takes days to refresh whenever someone on the top floor presses F9. (Shirley MacLaine plays an elevator attendant, so this is actually a romance between a button and a spreadsheet cell.)
One spreadsheet instead of an entire building. I wonder if they unionized?
The post is interesting (and long) and discusses topics like the my pet hate, the innovator’s dilemma (see earlier post) and how new technologies, tools and workflows replace old ones.
For decades, [MS Office’s breadth of features and market] has prompted the idea that if most people don’t need most of the features, a competitor, with fewer features but cheaper or with different routes to market, can peel away more and more of the users, leaving behind only the very core power users. This never really happened, and it seems to me that this may be the wrong way to think about the issue.
Excel replaced entire buildings of people sitting at desks, but who is going to replace Excel?
If you’re interested in Slack, disruptive innovation and technology, it’s well worth a read: Office, Messaging and Verbs.