I know, I’m a little late to Anil Dash’s intriguing post “The Enterprise, Apple, and Insufficient Ambition“, but it definitely warrants a mention. In it, he argues that there is a false division between consumer- and business-focused technology. In the former, devices like the iPod aim to make the user-experience itself compelling; it is not just the function of the iPod that makes it desirable, but how one accesses/interacts with that function. Business-oriented tech, on the other hand, tends to focus explicitly on productivity – an approach that, on the surface at least, seems to make sense – often at the expense of usability. For reference, a family member of mine is still forced to use some DOS-based software at IBM Canada, where the right control key acts as the Enter key…

But Dash argues that such a mindset is both lazy and elitist, drawing an artificial line between work and home life, keeping interesting technology for those who are affluent enough to afford it on their own dime. It’s an interesting argument, and a refreshing one too . Rather than speaking for the blogger elite or the affluent technorati, Dash seems concerned with how the experience of technology – and the relative benefits of productivity and worker satisfaction – require a little bit of ‘redistribution’ so that people who can’t afford a $600 iPhone can still get that sort of smart, usable interface when they head to work. That way, not only is work more productive, it’s simply more ejnoyable.

I know it seems like I’m always criticizing everything, but I do wonder to what extent we actually want our work and home lives to become homogeneous. If one’s work life is characterised on some level by competitiveness, achievement and ‘measurements’, do we really want to make those two facets of our lives more similar? It’s true that Dash is arguing for going the other way, but can you really say ‘it’s your health that counts’ or ‘I’ll sacrifice this for my kids’ at your average corporate job? Probably not – and I think a key aspect of the post was the insistence that ‘[i]n the developed world, we spend most of our waking hours at work, and the impact is enormous”. Isn’t that sort of part of the problem – the overlap of the capitalist values of the enterprise and one’s life, so that competitiveness, achievement and consumption become part of day-to-day existence?

Still, it’s an interesting way to approach things, and the one thing you could never fault Dash for is his passion – that sort of conviction is rare these days.

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