The most important thing about any tool in personal productivity IMO is whether the tool gets used in the first place.

Back in '84 I had the great privilege of being National Accounts Manager representing Apple in New Zealand. I remember participating in an expo at the Winter Show Buildings on Hutchison Road in Wellington where we laid out a number of tables with 128k Macintosh computers replete with mouse and keyboard (not unlike today's Apple Stores). You need to understand, this was in an age where absolutely no-one (especially in NZ) had ever seen a mouse let alone a bit-mapped graphical screen. Computers simply were not that immediate to use.

Just like today Apple was encouraging the public to get their hands on them and try them out. What stands out in my own memory is the number of parents who were telling their children "DO NOT TOUCH" and those kids who went ahead and sat down anyway. Watching young children draw their first picture ever on a computer truly blew my mind. THAT level of approachability and immediacy has been lost with so much software, even on smart phones.

One of the impressive measurements of productivity over the next decades was the average number of applications a Mac user used compared with the burgeoning Windows systems. It is the tools that actually get used that define productivity.

I left NZ a few years later. My clients in the US and elsewhere were primarily entrepreneurs who had championed their own mastery of personal productivity tools, be it Nashoba's FileMaker or the MacDraw, MacPaint, MacWrite and Multiplan tools. They did not need me to do that. The tools were simply usable. They built businesses using those tools themselves without any background in computer science (what was that?) or even business administration. Once their businesses exploded with growth, they needed more people, they needed to delegate and I became their technologist. Every one of them to this day laments to me that they couldn't even begin to sit down with PhotoShop or Illustrator or MySQL or the rest and repeat what they began.

Of course the most accessible of today's software tools are iOS/Android apps, but I have yet to see one get used by a young person to build the information system of a startup business. Today we need an IT department with programmers to meet the most basic of business requirements. Indeed it is 2022 and unbelievably there is not a single simple application on which one can run a business. An application with integrated accounting, contact management, and all activities - email, VoIP, scheduling, project management. "I want to look at all my customers that bought this product over the last 2 years with whom I have had email correspondence and send them an illustrated email about our follow-on product when its development reaches the next project milestone." Information is less integrated than you might think.

What has happened instead over my lifetime is that new technologies emerge and replace the old technologies but not with greater productivity, just with new paradigms. The Mac itself was an example of that. When it was released, the Apple II had considerably more hardware devoted to productivity software, as the graphical user interface gobbled up much of the Mac's 128k RAM. Fast forward to the 2007 4GB iPhone (yeah 4 GB) and the same thing happened. Just enough hardware to run the most rudimentary of apps, but oh my goodness what a sexy experience. I'm sure this will continue with the next generation of hardware (maybe floating in our Ray Kurzweilian bloodstream) - not enough hardware to do much of anything useful at first other than maybe connect with the cloud.

At the beginning of the personal computing revolution, I felt the overwhelming promise was one of the most intimate accessibility of unlimited personal productivity. That was the attractor. Today I'm not so sure we have that, and I am positive that fewer and fewer entrepreneurs are able to get their arms around 100% of their technology requirements. They might be really good at writing fully documented business plans, but they will need someone else to do the bookkeeping. Oh and someone else to do their web presence - maybe even a separate front-end person and a back-end person. And yeah we'll get that influencer to do our social. WTF!

I believe through and through that the accessibility of technology does not have to diverge as its capability increases.

Not the OP, but I think there's something in what they're saying. Technically, you can get close to the embedding that the Claris apps used to support with Word/Excel (although there's no separate vector/bitmap tools with the same integration). You even get something akin to System 7's Publish+Subscribe with Office.

At the same time, it feels a lot more fragile now, because the support is coming from Microsoft, it's not as baked into the platform as it was. The OG Mac did a lot of work to support a document paradigm – with features like aliases, stationary pads, publish+subscribe, solid drag+drop and clipboard, spatial Finder, etc. Even where these persist in OS X they're shadows of their past selves.

By the time you get to iOS the document paradigm is entirely gone, and you're dealing with app siloes which are ridiculously hard to bridge across. The web, even Google Docs, is similarly focused on the tool, not the output.

I'm not sure which paradigm is "better", to be honest. If you take the original document paradigm to its conclusion you end up with OpenDoc, which even if you make allowances for attempting it on underpowered 90s platforms, was probably the wrong direction. But the app paradigm makes composable workflows like OP describes in a sibling comment very difficult or impossible to achieve.

Back in the day, at this stage on the Mac, there was a universality to the data exchange.

The Mac had, among other things, four core data types: text, rich text, bitmap, and PICT.

PICT was an object based drawing (lines, circles, boxes), in contrast to a bitmap.

My memory is vague on Multiplan (I used it at the time, as a spreadsheet). But there was another program called MacChart. Either Multiplan didn't support charting (seems unlikely), or I was simply blind to it.

But, consider this simple workflow: Enter numbers into Multiplan, with all its calculating fun. Copy the column of numbers, hit Cmd-] (I think it was on Switcher), and now you're in MacChart. Paste that column, and you get your instant Pie chart, or Bar chart. Hit Copy again, Cmd-] again to MacDraw, and paste that chart in to MacDraw. Add your lines, labels, whatever you wanted to do to doctor the chart up that MacChart didn't do. All the elements of the chart are editable. The wedges, the rectangles, lines and axis, text etc. Copy again, CMD-], now you're in MacWrite. Paste it in there in the middle of your text. Add the "Figure 1", hit the "Center" button, print it on the LaserWriter, at full resolution (vs a 72 DPI bitmap on a 300 DPI printer). Back then we'd admonish folks that were using space to line up text in MacWrite or MacDraw, as it did not line up properly when printer on the LaserWriter. The ImageWriter was WYSIWYG, but the LaserWriter had more WYGIWIGY (What You Get Is What I Gives You). So, you instead should use ruler tabs and what not, vs the space character.

MacChart took rows of text and charted them. (The calculator desk accessory would sum a column of numbers if you pasted it in to it.) The results of the Multiplan calculations. MacDraw was, essentially, a PICT editor. I don't know if it stored PICTs, but it certainly worked with them as native. And then you stomped them into your MacWrite document.

If you pasted them in to MacPaint, then, boom, it's a bitmap, and you can do all your bitmappy things to it (one way trip, the PICT is lost).

Combined with Switcher (this was pre-Multifinder), at the time, not only was this an extraordinary demo (yea, it was a jaw dropping demo), it was an extraordinary reality. It WORKED!

I spent a lot of time doing this, making slides (printed on transparencies on the LaserWriter). I was on loan to this other group in the company, the manager tried to hire me away because of my l33t Chart and Draw skillz.

I don't know today if I pasted some graphics from Mac Keynote into MS Powerpoint if the it would go over as separate objects or what. I remember trying to paste some graphics from Visio into Powerpoint and it spit up its lunch. It certainly did not Just Work. I was aghast that these two MS products did not seamlessly work together (yes, I know they bought Visio...but, still...).

It's hard to convey how simple this all was. How it all "just worked", with no surprises. On this tiny little beige box with a 9" screen that "nobody considered as a serious computer".

Those few clipboard types where pretty universally respected and it let tools "do one thing well". Switcher let you stitch them together.