Seventh law of worker entropy
The JC’s seventh law of worker entropy states that successful inventions do not make things harder. The JC asserts, without evidence but, he feels, without needing it — for it is an a priori truth as certain as arithmetic or natural selection — there has been no successful innovation in design, commerce or technology in the history of civilisation itself that made life more tedious, difficult, frustrating or inconvenient than it already was.
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In support of the theory, we cite Peter Thiel — who has had the odd small success with tech innovation — whose operating assumption when considering whether to invest is that, to displace competitors and have a reasonable chance of success, a tech product should be an order of magnitude better than its competitors. Not just a bit better, but ten times better.[1]
If you want to change how people do things, make life easier for them.
This law is routinely ignored, at great cost to the poor subject matter experts on whose heads attendant tedium inevitably then rains down but also, gratifyingly, on the software as a service vendor whose bright[2] ideas they hawk to middle managers in the legal chief operating office.
Any innovation that, for example, injects a new dialog box, however well-intended — was there ever a dialog box that wasn’t well-intended? — into an existing process violates this principle.