The most important thing about any tool in personal productivity IMO is whether the tool gets used in the first place.

Back in '84 I had the great privilege of being National Accounts Manager representing Apple in New Zealand. I remember participating in an expo at the Winter Show Buildings on Hutchison Road in Wellington where we laid out a number of tables with 128k Macintosh computers replete with mouse and keyboard (not unlike today's Apple Stores). You need to understand, this was in an age where absolutely no-one (especially in NZ) had ever seen a mouse let alone a bit-mapped graphical screen. Computers simply were not that immediate to use.

Just like today Apple was encouraging the public to get their hands on them and try them out. What stands out in my own memory is the number of parents who were telling their children "DO NOT TOUCH" and those kids who went ahead and sat down anyway. Watching young children draw their first picture ever on a computer truly blew my mind. THAT level of approachability and immediacy has been lost with so much software, even on smart phones.

One of the impressive measurements of productivity over the next decades was the average number of applications a Mac user used compared with the burgeoning Windows systems. It is the tools that actually get used that define productivity.

I left NZ a few years later. My clients in the US and elsewhere were primarily entrepreneurs who had championed their own mastery of personal productivity tools, be it Nashoba's FileMaker or the MacDraw, MacPaint, MacWrite and Multiplan tools. They did not need me to do that. The tools were simply usable. They built businesses using those tools themselves without any background in computer science (what was that?) or even business administration. Once their businesses exploded with growth, they needed more people, they needed to delegate and I became their technologist. Every one of them to this day laments to me that they couldn't even begin to sit down with PhotoShop or Illustrator or MySQL or the rest and repeat what they began.

Of course the most accessible of today's software tools are iOS/Android apps, but I have yet to see one get used by a young person to build the information system of a startup business. Today we need an IT department with programmers to meet the most basic of business requirements. Indeed it is 2022 and unbelievably there is not a single simple application on which one can run a business. An application with integrated accounting, contact management, and all activities - email, VoIP, scheduling, project management. "I want to look at all my customers that bought this product over the last 2 years with whom I have had email correspondence and send them an illustrated email about our follow-on product when its development reaches the next project milestone." Information is less integrated than you might think.

What has happened instead over my lifetime is that new technologies emerge and replace the old technologies but not with greater productivity, just with new paradigms. The Mac itself was an example of that. When it was released, the Apple II had considerably more hardware devoted to productivity software, as the graphical user interface gobbled up much of the Mac's 128k RAM. Fast forward to the 2007 4GB iPhone (yeah 4 GB) and the same thing happened. Just enough hardware to run the most rudimentary of apps, but oh my goodness what a sexy experience. I'm sure this will continue with the next generation of hardware (maybe floating in our Ray Kurzweilian bloodstream) - not enough hardware to do much of anything useful at first other than maybe connect with the cloud.

At the beginning of the personal computing revolution, I felt the overwhelming promise was one of the most intimate accessibility of unlimited personal productivity. That was the attractor. Today I'm not so sure we have that, and I am positive that fewer and fewer entrepreneurs are able to get their arms around 100% of their technology requirements. They might be really good at writing fully documented business plans, but they will need someone else to do the bookkeeping. Oh and someone else to do their web presence - maybe even a separate front-end person and a back-end person. And yeah we'll get that influencer to do our social. WTF!

I believe through and through that the accessibility of technology does not have to diverge as its capability increases.