Control

So much of the digital apps is centered on control and domination of our work styles.  While I have a gmail account (and it is the only way that I can have an Android phone), I do very little of my regular "stuff" via that account.  I also have to have it for Blogger. (But that is a different account).  I actually have three gmail accounts.

I have no plans to make my life Google-centric.  I don't use Google docs, I don't share calendars via Google.  I am, a child of corporate America and for the most part, that means that I've been digitally born in a Windows setting.  However, I rely on Google to do quite a few things that are somewhat centric in my life (searching, blogging).  But I don't want to be wedded to this or that.

Lotus 123 and AmiPro were my first spreadsheet and word processing respectivley in what I would call second generation development.  Had I had my druthers, I would still be in Lotus and AmiPro. Lotus did not win that bitterly fought and hard lost battle of platforms.  The battle for technologically supremacy is brutal--and it is the users of the failed technology that pay the price of having to switch after a long fight. 

We don't realize how dependent we are on a certain 'style' of operating digitally until it has either been wrested from us forcefully, or we voluntarily change. Such transition it is not different than putting a cook in a new kitchen.  Mise en place for our desktop software is not different than mise en place for cooks, carpenters or surgeons. When our root tools are uprooted, it tosses us into disequilibrium...until of course we assimilate and integrate new processes/tools into our repertoire. So much of our lives (driving, workprocessing, cooking, spreadsheeting) is on auto pilot (because we have inculcated our foundational tools into the core of our non-thinking operations) that when we have to stop, think (read bumble) about the most simplistic tasks take on herculean proportions.  Simple stuff, becomes an epic journey and leaves one with a headache.

My recent transition from my Blackberry Curve to the Android has resurrected painful memories of Lotus 123 withdrawal though MS was kind enough to simulate the "backslash" rules of Lotus.  That eased a bit of the pain, but when you realize that there are certain things that you've always done (computationally) that are now just a wee bit different (meaning computational logic yields a different result), it is unsettling.

They are the same, but different enough to cause a stumble.  That is why I don't use Open Office....it is the same in objective output, but not the same in terms of our intuiting them through years of learning and operating.  I'm very cognizant of that because I have a client on an older version of Excel, while I have been working in a newer version.  They synapses burn for new work processes, and we move on.

A reminder that we always need a foundation on which we can rely upon and build on.  Regression is never welcomed.  Nor should it be.