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Ligeti Man Meat
Citizen
Username: Ligeti
Post Number: 653
Registered: 7-2002
| | Posted on Thursday, May 4, 2006 - 3:52 pm: | 
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While computers can do impressive things, businesses should be asking whether an electronic presentation gets the job done better than overhead slides, whether email is better than the telephone, and whether a memo with clip art, cute colors and four fonts is better than the plain text equivalent. Before you respond that it's no trouble to do all these things because the conference room can display electronic presentations, everyone has a computer for email, and font and colors are simple to add using your word processor, remember how much all that infrastructure costs. If the worldwide return due to information technology was $3 trillion per year, we'd just break even. That's how much business spends on it.
What fraction of a typical PC's computing power goes to doing office tasks and what fraction to screen savers? How much time is wasted playing solitaire or browsing the Internet? And how much time is spent learning new software, tweaking and customizing, performing maintenance and backing up files, recovering from viruses, helping coworkers with PC problems, wading through unimportant email and spam, and dealing with any of a dozen additional PC support tasks? These costs are tough to pin down, but one survey estimated that over $300 billion worth of time is lost annually to personal Internet surfing in U.S. businesses. Another estimates that the time spent fiddling with computers rather than working on them costs another $100 billion.
The PC can be an excellent servant but it is a demanding master.
Bob Seidensticker, Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change
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Case
Citizen
Username: Case
Post Number: 1496
Registered: 2-2005
| | Posted on Thursday, May 4, 2006 - 4:00 pm: |
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Hey, look! Another cut-and-paste job! 
I guess he's done with the last thread? |
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Closed: New threads not accepted on this page