A story about the initial introduction of computers to the lab my dad worked at, with no particular concrete conclusion:

My father is a microbiologist. When he started his postdoc at OHSU, they actually had a information artist guy in the department (apologies, I have no idea what the profession's name actually is). When you were writing a paper, you'd go to the graphics office/dept/whatever and give him your data, which he'd then lay out in some huge post board or something, then take a picture of it and shrink it down. Clearly much more time consuming than what Excel can accomplish for you now. I think around that same time they were just starting to get computers installed everywhere. By the time my dad left OHSU a few years later, this person was working in the mail room, his profession no longer existed (or at least wasn't particularly employable anymore). Everyone was now making their own charts, graphs, visualizations or what-have-you using their computers.

I, being a programmer, always thought about this as a success story. Interestingly enough, my dad has a different take on it. His perspective is that he used to be a scientist, now he's a scientist and a shitty artist. The way he sees it, its now his responsibility to learn this myriad of tools (photoshop, illustrator, Canvas hehe), whereas before his sole focus was more so on "the science". I certainly see it on my end, he's much better at Photoshop than I am, and at the same time knows a bit of HTML to get by, etc etc. However the reality isn't that the time to make these graphics has magically dropped to zero, its just that is become simple enough to not justify having an entire art department handling it, but hard enough to be annoying to him. He certainly spends a lot of time being angry at Photoshop now, which seems to be perfectly acceptable for a professional designer, but a strange consequence of being a scientist. Another result is that you now have someone not trained in data visualization trying to express his findings (vs possibly having someone who has a degree in that making suggestions about how to best present it).

Its interesting to try to reconcile these results. Its quite possible that there is no lesson here and its simply a spectrum of trade offs, no perfect scenario. Certainly everyone agrees Microsoft Word is a clear net positive, maybe visualization is just less of a win. Or maybe this is just because we are in an intermediate step, at some point things will be so easy that you 1) don't need a separate department, 2) it takes almost no time and 3) it inspires you to create really good visualizations without having much background in that. Who knows.

On the other hand some people would argue that this is actually displaying a deeper educational problem, where if there was more interdisciplinary teaching, then every scientist would have some grasp of data visualization and then its just a matter of having a better Photoshop. As time goes on I become more and more skeptical of this approach however. It seems strange to "empower" people when you are actually burdening them with additional responsibility. Since you can do everything yourself, it now becomes "your fault" for not being good at everything.