| I worry about the blind-spot the youngest workers may have in this regard. When I was young and starting out in a corporate job, I also didn't have much loyalty to anything. This wasn't a function of a new age of tech Aquarius, it was simply because I was young and didn't have experience - no basis to form loyalties. Youngest workers may not realize the value prop of Outlook and Excel fat clients simply because they haven't been hit with requirements that promote or even compel their use, but in the meantime those young workers are never getting highly proficient with the basics of using them. There's a reason more seasoned knowledge workers (not 70yo, but 30-60 for sure) rely on them beyond inertia - broader requirements, favored features, road experience and ubiquity. Similar angle on your comment about platform loyalty - a young person won't be invested in a platform until they have the experience to recognize the penalties of swapping. Since I mentioned Excel already, keyboard shortcuts in Excel change across platforms. If Excel is considered a given part of your toolbox, this is one of the most aggravating things about swapping OS's periodically: your muscle memory doesn't apply. That's a real hit to productivity. Young people don't recognize this until they develop a skill level that will be impacted by these kinds of changes and are busy enough to not have time to deal with them. So I wonder sometimes when I hear about that attitude - are they shooting themselves in the foot by not training early on or even having awareness of the potentially more advanced tooling options? When I start getting into new hobbies I look at the tools the more advanced people use and learn what may (or may not) make them favored - as well as consider new ways of doing things. I also try to start on the better tools even if the learning curve is higher just so I can start racking up XP with them more quickly - so anticipating that a time will come when I too will leverage and appreciate the features, I'll not be starting from scratch. That's worked well. |
Pittman shorthand, for instance, was a pretty useful system that only enthusiasts use these days. The most trivial change that axed this was purely social: men learned how to type.
Similarly, business is being done in different ways that will make other old useful tools less applicable.
The march to the grave starts at the crib, sorry about that.