Notice how everything is more expensive over the years? There are many reasons. I am not saying there is one reason. But I know for a fact that one of the reasons is inefficiency. How can this be? We have more technology, machines and systems designed to make life a breeze. Guess what, it rarely does. Especially when technology changes weekly. I see it all the time working at a Service Desk. I see tools ill suited for what they were intended to solve. Causing more work, and more frustration. What does the leadership think needs to be done to solve these issues? You got it, more technology.
If you have worked, as I have in a paper and pen environment, through the years, up to today’s high tech environment, you know this is true.
I will put forward just a few possible reasons for this paradox.
MS is a business, and as such they are in the business to make money and to ‘seem’ efficient. That does not mean that they are selling efficient products. They just brand it that way. Ask yourself why software is so expensive? They surely did not spend millions to create it. If they did, that doesn’t sound very efficient, does it. Odd coming from a company touting efficiency and how much money your company will save.
Why do they upgrade it so often? Not fix the current version, but actually we-write it and brand it as new. Win XP, Win, 7, Win 10, Win 11. Can anyone really point to any of these updates and say this is a NEW product. They are barely distinguishable other than cosmetic changes to the end user. And yet we are told we must upgrade or the end of the world will occur. Actually Win 11 takes MORE clicks on average to do the same things as Win 10. Old Team, New Teams, Old Outlook, new Outlook. They do the exact same thing.
One reason for the cosmetic changes in the software is so they can sell you training. An industry in itself. If they made software easy to use, which they can, you would not need to spend company dollars on training.
Planned obsolescence is built into all this technology. If they sold you a product that worked and would be working for years to come, that would kill the tech companies bottom line. Ever wonder why a PC or phone that was fast only a few years ago is slow? What changed? Nothing did. Just the updates and new, and better, software, that does the exact same thing, is poorly written and requires faster processors, more memory and more disk space.
Technology is gaslighting the world, and we love it. Stupid huh?
Let’s talk about mechanical technology bloat. Say in farming. How about tractors (the same goes for cars). Does a tractor really need a GPS and computer and all the other electronics sold on them today. No, we had fully functioning tractors before the miracle of electronics. But now they cost more, cost more to maintain and repair, and have more parts that will break down. I would suggest that an older tractor was cheaper and less costly to maintain and would last longer.
What we have basically built is three industries on top of all our existing industries, and government. You have the hardware industry building products that will soon be out of date. The software industry ensures this by upgrading products, actually making them worse and harder to use in many cases. And then with this ever changing landscape you have the parasitic training industry.
We are using technology solutions to replace people at a higher cost. Madness is us.