Seventh law of worker entropy
 An invention making life easier, yesterday. Well, in 1804.
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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.
In support of the theory, we cite Peter Thiel — who has had the odd small success starting up (and, er, shutting down) innovative internet businesses — whose operating assumption when considering an investment is that to see off competition 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. Not harder. 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 makes life harder, however exciting the prospect of enhanced MIS that comes from having the users repetitively click it may be.
The seventh 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 vendors whose bright[2] ideas they hawk to middle managers in the legal chief operating office.