Failure of product metaphor in Word
What has surprised me for a long time in Office 365 is that with all their top-of-the-shelf product management, their product still misses the critical feature of the document panes.
For example, I tried to write the last article in Word instead of the usual flow in Obsidian or Logseq, and I couldn’t. When you write an article, you have a research focus (thesis, hypotheses, questions, method) written in the front and arguments across the text. And when you write, you should look at them not to lose focus.
It is straightforward in Obsidian or Logseq but challenging when doing the same in Word. It just doesn’t have the functionality of panes or sidebar or clipboard. They still use the same old text processor metaphor without changing it.
It’s the same problem with YouTube, for example. As a creator, I always fought with interpretations of calls to action and content efficiency through likes. They are missing the timestamp feature. That would be a considerable improvement — I would know precisely when they reacted. Was my CtA compelling? What part of the content engages them best?
I wrote about the idea of product metaphor in one of my articles and still think #productmanagement and #systemsengineering will benefit from burrowing science and technology studies concepts and adapting them for their frameworks. For example, in the last 5th edition of the SE Handbook, INCOSE emphasizes (again, with the new reference) that products = systems. Well, they are not if you look from the microsociology and STS perspective, and this was the thesis from the article I started the story with.
Anyway, it is a whole new world of product management for me to research from SE viewpoints.
