Arguably the biggest pile of money in hi-tech’s first few decades was made on work. I am referring to Microsoft of course. But IBM, Dell, HP etc. fit this bill too. PC’s were great for gaming, sure, and this was part of the reason everybody had a PC at home too. But the real money was not made on home PC or software sales, it was made on enterprise license sales. Office, Windows licenses, SQL Server, Exchange and later SharePoint, those were the cash cows. Apple never really got into the enterprise, so they were left on the sideline, while the Wintel duopoly marched ahead during the nineties, seemingly unstoppable. This is well documented. Real business has always been in work, Hollywood and the music industry were sideshows.

Some would argue, that during the seventies, eighties and nineties production work was gradually automatized to an extent, that the objective of most work today is no longer production, but mostly serves as a mechanism for the distribution of wealth. To my knowledge no extensive research exists to validate this hypothesis, but take a look around your immediate network of friends, coworkers, or for a more neutral outlook, your extended family. How many are involved in production or some kind of direct service (like nurse or teacher)? Probably not the majority. How many are involved in some kind of administration or management? Take a look here, for some more insight into this.

Enter Apple v.2 in the very late nineties. Steve Jobs was back, determined to make a killing, not in the enterprise where he was burnt a few times before, but in the home. “Digital hub” was the battle cry. He knew human nature, and had probably done the math long before the rest of us. Play was going to be bigger than work. The new Apple wanted to make money, not on people working, but on people playing. And they did. People played music, movies and games on their iMacs, iPods and iPhones, and Apple built a bigger pile of money than the world had ever seen before. Play was the new gold mine.

Computers have always been about both work and play. Hobbyists started the industry, eventually the suits made business with it, gaming exploded, which actually for a while pushed computers deeper into work. So, in many ways I think our industry mirrors the framework of society. Lately social has been where all the money is flowing, and where the brigthest minds of our industry toil away. So is social work or play? We are social creatures, social is essential for our core mental well-being etc. But while Linkedin certainly has helped many find a new job, I still do think social, as represented by Facebook and the myriad of social apps and websites, squarely belongs in the play area of our mental activities. Our society, it would seem, is still headed in the general direction of the playground.

The most iconic tech company of the Internet age, Google, was never quite clear about it’s intentions: Are their services for working or for playing around? Mostly they don’t care, as long as you watch ads. As has been said many times before, their product is you, whether you are working or playing. Maybe that’s why they never really figured out how to make good work tools or good play experiences. Google Docs started out clearly as a work tool, eventually got rebranded as Drive, now it’s set to be integrated with Google+, which will probably end up mostly as a place to store and edit snapshots from your smartphone. From my limited viewpoint, almost a decade after Google Docs launched, MS Office still reigns supreme in work. Google+ on the other hand, was never a good place to play, maybe because it was never quite clear that’s what it was for. The same thing could be said about Android Market. Google, being Google, of course knows that work is on the retreat, and in 2012 rebranded Android Market to Google Play. Regardless of what many claim, mobile devices were never about work, at least not efficient work. Google knows this, and now makes it abundantly clear. No more unclear intentions.

So, where does that leave most of us for most of our working hours? Simply put, in the hands of enterprise IT. Yes, the same guys who built the mainframe and brought us Windows Vista are still doing their thing. Apple and Google never really took interest. Some things are slowly changing, but for the most part our work tools are a tangled mess. An infinite number of people spend ther day using software like this, in order to coordinate the installation of things like these, so people can work using stuff like this. There have been small signs of change, like Salesforce.com and yes, Google Docs and Linkedin. The geek world imtermittently took interest, and gave us OpenOffice and Java, which all eventually ended up in the hands of this guy. No more disruption there. The web world has also created tools that get used in some enterprises, like Basecamp and Huddle, but mostly things trudge along the same path they have been following the last couple of decades. Consultants and enterprise IT still provide the tools you use to work. No wonder most people prefer to play.

Has the state of our work tools contributed to a general degradation of work, and a shift of focus from work to play, or are we simply running out of work? Is work important? Should we try to change the current situation, or even disrupt it? I think these are important questions, that are practically absent from public debate today, even when effectively most workers today are, what used to be termed information workers. Our most important work tool is the computer. I love my iDevices, but this article was typed on a computer. Without going into pointless discussions, I venture to state that mobile devices are better suited for consumption, while computers are better suited for production. Assuming a society consisting of people who feel useful is a better society, I suggest we give workers better tools for production. Tools that make them feel productive and useful. Tools that are at least as good as the tools we have at our disposal for organizing our spare time, our hobbies, our parties, for communicating with friends, sharing photos of good moments in our lives and yes, playing around. Where do we start?