I think that matching logos with some kind of rainbow puke that’s means nothing is one of the biggest sins of modern designers.

Not exactly nothing, all the Office icons are visual representations of the main thing you can do with the app. A sheet with lines on it for Word, a sheet of cells for Excel, a very impressive diagram for Powerpoint …

Access is admittedly bit unclear but somehow people have always visualized databanks as cylindrical silos. Because databanks’re used to ferment the data before being fed to the C suite (C is for cattle).

The older icons were more obvious though.