The other day I was gripping with a colleague about the rapid decline ofTechCrunch reporting since the departure of Michael Arrington. Well, the website proved their lack of journalistic abilities with a recent post entitled “The Post-Office Generation.”
To summarize the article, John Biggs discusses another blog post over at Minimal Mac all about the giant miss that is Microsoft Office. It’s a wonderful article that outlines that Microsoft’s biggest failures isn’t that it kept Microsoft Office in the PC world instead of iOS and Android, but that it showed the world it could survive without Microsoft Office.
But that’s not really the point of my post. I agree completely with Patrick Rhone on the Microsoft Office topic. We don’t need Word, Outlook and Excel. There’s a wide variety of other options out there that do the job just as well. Some even are free, such as Google Apps, which gives you your documents and apps wherever you are.
However, in John Biggs’ post he talks about the automation of office workflows and the conversion of paper to electronic documents. He professes a state of shock at the notion that we’re not in a completely paperless system yet and how useless it is for him or anyone to fill out paper forms as no one will have the time or resources to actually read the form. Biggs does recover slightly by admitting that the technology and processes simply aren’t there yet for a completely paperless office, but the damage is already done.
What sets me overboard is this line: “And what was Access (remember Access?) but a way to put those poor schlubs in records out of a job?” This is where I feel his greatest short come on reporting falls. How does simply having a database software suite put records workers out of a job? Who does he think creates the procedures, processes and protocols for how that software is used in the office? Who does he think converts those paper documents he finds archaic (and honestly, so do I, but that’s another rant for another day) into electronic data that is easily digested by similar database software?
In the end, he should have simply stayed on topic and discussed how Office is a non-essential software suite in our ever evolving marketplace. He was dead on when he wrote that Microsoft Office wasn’t necessarily a miss, but rather a paradigm shift. That’s exactly right as more and more tools of the office are moving to the form of apps and virtual support. Dedicated applications will soon be a thing of the past, however, that doesn’t mean the past will entirely disappear. There will always be a need for paper and people who can convert that paper into organization that meets accepted standards and practices.
Also posted at LegalRIM.net.
