Sunday 9 May 2010

The lost tribes of Microsoft Office

There is a branch of software anthropology which categorises office workers by reference to the Microsoft application through which they understand the world. This provides a fascinating application of Kuhnian paradigm (and Darwinian) theory to office life and software usage.
The theory goes that different individuals, doing different roles, become familiar with - and develop an early dependency on - a different "host" application. For example:
  • a legal clerk will mostly use Microsoft Word or Outlook.
  • a financial structurer or trader will mostly use Microsoft Excel.
  • a salesperson or a middle manager will learn their trade through the prism of Microsoft PowerPoint.

In a relatively short time, this inclination will develop into a full-blown dependency, to the point where the host application plays an active formative role in the worker's intellectual and technical development. As such the dependency will become increasingly hard to de-program (though there are generally accepted methods of doing this) and, in a broader timescale, the worker's thus-formulated needs will formative in the ongoing development of the application: a positive feedback loop of epic proportions).
As a result workers of the different persuasions (or "tribes") will adapt their own "host" applications in extraordinary ways to do their bidding - an Excel wizard will somehow contort a spreadsheet until it functions as a word processor, or a flow diagram generator. Powerpoint experts will communicate with a different vocabulary altogether, and will tend to see almost everything in the world in terms of a Gantt chart.
Needless to say, interesting situations develop when hotly loyal tribal members then interact.

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