The New Busy

Shitty. Microsoft hasn’t changed their approach one bit since the original false-promise of theirs; that somehow being able to work from anywhere was going to equate to “freedom”… when in fact it does the exact opposite.

Also, their visuals haven’t changed much either… still showing people working on laptops in the grass. The key word here is still “working”, however.

To quote Walter Kirn in his excellent article “Autumn of the Multitaskers“…

“Where do you want to go today?” asked Microsoft in a mid-1990s ad campaign. The suggestion was that there were endless destinations—some geographic, some social, some intellectual—that you could reach in milliseconds by loading the right devices with the right software. It was further insinuated that where you went was purely up to you, not your spouse, your boss, your kids, or your government. Autonomy through automation.

This was the embryonic fallacy that grew up into the monster of multitasking.

Human freedom, as classically defined (to think and act and choose with minimal interference by outside powers), was not a product that firms like Microsoft could offer, but they recast it as something they could provide. A product for which they could raise the demand by refining its features, upping its speed, restyling its appearance, and linking it up with all the other products that promised freedom, too, but had replaced it with three inferior substitutes that they could market in its name:

Efficiency, convenience, and mobility.

Between this and the rest of the technological world focusing on integrating aspects of social media into their products (even Photoshop CS5 has a social networking element built into it now), i’m just aghast at how fully the working world is plunging into the multitasking frenzy. Are you guys REALLY ready for a world where facebook is built right into all your office-based applications? Sorry, i’m plugged in enough as it is…

Tags: hotmail, microsoft, multitasking, the new busy