The point I'm trying to make is that there is a difference between your mission and the mission's unintended outcome.
As an engineer, I don't believe my mission is to put people out of jobs. In response to some of your points:
Yes, self-driving cars will put people out of jobs. But is that the mission of Google? No, their mission is to make people's lives easier / better.
Yes, electric cars will put gas-pump attendants out of jobs. Is that the mission of Tesla? No, their mission is to make people's lives better through sustainable transport and removing our dependence on fossil fuels.
I think it's important to focus on the value-add portion of what we do, and especially not treat the negative fallout (people losing their jobs) as some kind of marketing angle.
What we find distasteful is inherently subjective after all. Designing ads is a tricky one (and really, I have never had much of a result from this type of paid advertising so I don't do any) and I recognize the need to maximise CTR where ad budget is concerned.
But in the same way that Godaddy uses buxom female models to promote their products (which works well for them) and some people find that distasteful, I find this distasteful.
It's a personal opinion.
Despite all that, if social media is a big part of your business, no amount of software is going to replace the expert who knows how to maintain a brand-voice, can do content-writing, customer correspondence, document and track trends, etc.
Saying "fire your social media manager" is probably just bad advice if anything.
At the macro unless your name is Oracle your productivity software will reduce the number of people needed to accomplish a task. Assuming your software works of course. Patio11's main product is to replace secretaries, while improving customer retention.
Because if it's the latter, then nobody lost their job - he just enabled that person to do their job better.
The reason I ask is because I started my startup http://beatrixapp.com thinking the same thing - that the end-user would be the business owner.
It turns out that only in a small number of cases is that actually true.
The main segment is still social media managers, my software makes their life easier, it doesn't replace their entire job spec and I don't think it ever will.
Yes.
Doing things that matter, changing people's lives, that SHOULD change what jobs people do.
[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...
My post is about using that as a marketing angle for your startup - which I find distasteful. There's so many other, more positive things, you can use as your marketing message.
I think the answer is yes. Making human effort unnecessary is a good measure of value having been added to the world, because that human effort is now free to do something else.
Pity the stagecoach drivers, but don't let it stop you from celebrating the automobiles.
An example: Self driving cars will eventually put Taxi Drivers out of jobs. Does that mean a Start-up that wants to be in this industry is evil? I don't think so.
Salesforce (a company specifically mentioned by OP) certainly didn't aim to put salespeople out of business. It did, however, greatly reduce the need for assistants and secretaries that used to be instrumental in keeping salespeople organized, thus eliminating many such positions. Mailchimp (another company mentioned) certainly created some new email marketing positions, but in the process it helped optimize email-use, which is itself a kind of optimization of traditional mail. Thus one could reasonably argue that Mail Chimp helps put people in the paper industry and in the Postal industry out of work.
The author's Salesforce example is particularly naive. While it would probably be inaccurate to claim that Salesforce alone slayed Siebel[1], the reality is that Salesforce did upend the CRM market. In doing so, Salesforce created significant value, but at the expense of established CRM software providers and many of the integrators that relied on the demand for their products.
[1] http://fortune.com/2014/01/23/lessons-from-the-death-of-a-te...
I honestly hope someone is trying to make this happen, even though it'll completely kill millions of jobs. Hopefully the drivers can find new skills. The economy certainly wouldn't mind an extra 1 million programmers.
