Pay Better Attention to Your Employees’ Desktop!
by Aner Ravon

There is an interesting theory going around. According to that theory, a company will basically make roadmap decisions based on what the employees need at work. The inverse side of the theory is that a company will not develop what the employees do not miss at work. Paul Graham and Nick Carr try to predict the future of Google, Microsoft and the companies that surround and are impacted. On a Techcrunch interview, Paul Graham analyzed how to go get in the Google mindset as an innovator:

I wouldn’t advise competing with Google in things they’re good at. So what is Google good at? As a first approximation, making things their own developers use at work. So they’ll do a better job on an online calendar than a video sharing site, for example, because their employees are probably not supposed to be sitting watching videos at work.

Nick Carr then addresses Microsoft’s suspiciously-laid-back approach to web apps:

It’s been widely assumed, among the tech-forward Web 2.0 crowd, that it will be the end users who will drive the adoption of purely web-based office apps - and that corporate IT departments will be the obstructionists. I think it will actually play out in the opposite way….

…Whatever the flaws of Microsoft Office, most end users are comfortable with it - and they have little motivation to overturn the apple cart. What is absolutely unacceptable to them is to take a step backward in functionality - which is exactly what would be required to make the leap to web PPAs today. Web apps not only disappear when you lose an internet connection, they are also less responsive for many common tasks, don’t handle existing Office files very well, have deficiencies in printing (never underestimate the importance of hard copy in business), and have fewer features (Microsoft Office of course has way too many, but - here’s the rub - different people value different ones).

In fairness, Nick Carr probably referred to corporate workers in general, but the theory still applies. In short, we should all pay much better attention to how we configure our corporate firewall and what kind of desktop we create for our employees!

Aner Ravon
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