My pet hypothesis is that most of the "productivity improvements" companies achieved thanks to office / business-side software was really accounting trickery, even if unintentional one. A lot of the distracting bullshit we - and everyone else with an office job - has to do regularly, used to be someone's actual job. The flip side of software making a task so easy everyone could do it themselves, is that... everyone has to do it themselves. What used to be done by specialists is now spread evenly across the company, tacked onto the job description or just plain assumed. I called this an accounting trick, because the salaries no longer paid are legible on the balance sheet, while general productivity drop all across the board is not.
Despair. Resist creating, promoting or buying technologies that eliminate jobs not by automating them away, but by offloading the work to a much greater population, thereby diluting it until it's seemingly gone. Favor dealing with people over self-service processes. Or, at the very least, understand this failure mode of economic metrics and don't accept claims of productivity gains at face value.
My pet hypothesis is that most of the "productivity improvements" companies achieved thanks to office / business-side software was really accounting trickery, even if unintentional one. A lot of the distracting bullshit we - and everyone else with an office job - has to do regularly, used to be someone's actual job. The flip side of software making a task so easy everyone could do it themselves, is that... everyone has to do it themselves. What used to be done by specialists is now spread evenly across the company, tacked onto the job description or just plain assumed. I called this an accounting trick, because the salaries no longer paid are legible on the balance sheet, while general productivity drop all across the board is not.