Fraser Speirs – Blog – Future Shock

Fraser Speirs – Blog – Future Shock: “The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.”

(…)

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.

In the meantime, Adobe and Microsoft will continue to stamp their feet and whine.

(Via Tao of Mac)

Hmmm… while I agree that computers are too complicated and often hinder “real work” I don’t really what loss of background processing or lack of flash support has to do with it. And there is no good reason not to safeguard the ability to tinker.

Nevertheless, Speirs is correct: the iPhone and the iPad are devices that have the potential to allow people to focus on doing the “real work” instead of “managing” their computers. Just think of how many blog posts there are dedicated to making your computer work (e.g. how to defragment your drive, repair filesystem, remove virus, …). There is also a lot of complexity at the application-level: even keynote is not easy to use! Not enough anyway. I’ll have to try the iPad version for myself before I can comment on it.

(PS: I don’t use Pages & Numbers. I usually have no need for spreadsheets and Pages is just really bad)

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