Ask Paul: August 11 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here's an incredible set of reader questions, many tied to important debates, to get the weekend started a bit early.
Theories about the future
AnOldAmigaUser asks:

On FRD this morning you were discussing Brad's daughter having to use a Chromebook. You mentioned that kids growing up with Google apps would expect to use them at work, and that the Office Web apps would not really be equivalent in their eyes.

Yes.

I would argue that what young people expect, and what they will get in the corporate world are two different things. Any company that has been using Office for 40 years or so, is not going to change. I would also say that for the vast majority of users, Google Workspace apps and Office Online apps are equivalent because the vast majority of users do not take advantage of the bits at the bleeding edge where one or the other will have advantages.

I'm kind of surprised by how much debate there is around this, but of course we all have our own theories about what will happen in the future, and these theories are based on our own experiences. I've expressed this and related sentiments many times, and in my timeframe, I witnessed some fascinating transitions in IT, among them the advent of personal devices (especially the iPod at first) with USB connections (which triggered old-school IT pros to literally superglue USB ports shut), the resulting "consumerization of IT" movement, the transition from heavy-touch, on-prem PC and device management solutions to light-touch and then fully cloud-based Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions like Intune, the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement that combines personal and work data on a single device with selective remote wipe capabilities, the rise of Google Workspace (Docs, etc.) and ad-hoc apps as inexpensive and lightly managed solutions (Notion, Slack, etc.) to counter what's now called Microsoft 365, the Work From Home (WFH) push during the pandemic, the resulting hybrid work scenarios we now enjoy/endure, and so on. And so every time someone says to me, Paul, you don't get it, IT will never allow that (whatever "that" is), I almost have to laugh because IT has been allowing more and more for over two decades. And my belief, my theory, based on this experience, is that that will never change. That is, IT is all about change. It has to be, because technology is all about change. All they can do is manage it as best they can but also adapt to the times.

With regard to what young people use and expect, and what may or may not happen to them in the workforce of the future, consider Microsoft Teams. One might argue that today's Fortune 500 is so wrapped up in Microsoft 365 that they would never even consider using Google Workspace or those many other ad hoc app/service solutions. But then Slack was such a big deal that Microsoft had to create Microsoft Teams, which would never have happened otherwise because chat-based collaboration---wait for it---is a technology...