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Information Overload Overblown, Says Gates
Aarthi writes "Microsoft's annual CEO meet-and-greet kicked off on Thursday with the company's Chairman, Bill Gates, countering the notion that the workers today are not overloaded with information.'We still want a lot of information.' He also outlined plans for Office 12, the next version of its desktop software, which is due to arrive in the second half of next year." From the article: "There is a real temptation that the thing that comes in the latest is the one you shift your attention to, even though that may be the least important...That turns you into a filing clerk."
..."the thing that comes in the latest" is a warning of a gaping security hole in your browser?
"Knowledge, sir, should be free to all!"
~Harcourt Fenton Mudd
Yeah, well, thanks for giving me the latest scoop on what some plutocrat college dropout thinks about how the brain works. Tell ya what, if I ever need some solid info on "information overload", I think I will consult someone who actually knows something about it, like maybe a neuroscientist, or something.
Who gives a fuck what Bill Gates thinks about every little thing?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
It appears that Bill Gates is not immune to this ego inflating weakness of the human condition.
I only know this, due to having read a bit of study a year or so back. So, my information could be wrong, out of date or otherwise inaccurate.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Don't you get it? This is America. Where talking out of your ass is an art form.
We see this everyday. Some call it bullshit. Others call it spin. Regardless of what is actually is, it's destructive.
What is surprising is that more don't call this stuff out like you did. I wish that happened more.
Gates mainly got rich because his family connections got him his first big contract. His family was Old Money, and his mom used her connections to get him in with IBM. And his family's old money got him educated at one of the best private schools in the country. And he has genetics on his side. Genetics and family connections aint gonna brush off from reading his latest self-indulgent musings.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
From TFA1:
"I'd say in all of these cases, we are really dealing with information underload," Gates said in his talk, which kicked off Microsoft's annual CEO Summit. "We still want a lot of information."
From TFA2:
Raikes noted studies that show that the average worker gets about 10 times as much e-mail now as in 1997. That's projected to increase another fivefold in the next four years, Raikes said.
Either Raikes and Gates don't know each other, or they use different definitions for "information". From Gates' point of view, information is probably what's left after his army of PAs has filtered the e-mail box and the income paper bin, leaving only neat reports and meaningful mails out of the whole damn mess. A typical grunt, however, will have to do the whole thing himself. Even the simple act of recognizing an e-mail as spam is an information gathering and processing system, and you have to do that for each spam that goes through the filter. And then there's the unavoidable corporate and friendly spam (don't tell me you don't have it), in the form of memos you don't care about, rules for using the printer and the latest joke your buddy across the hall has found on the Net.
These ARE harmful to your concentration, to your productivity and to the level of stress that you aquire at the end of the day. Information oveload? You bet. Every context shift you do sets you back at least 15 minutes in concentration (scientifically proven, ask any serious psychologist). More than half the job of a competent PA is to shield you from that. And there's no software out there that can replace a PA.
Just
- Turn off the TV (download your shows if you must). - Browse with ad / flash blocking tools or with an RSS feed reader. - Don't sign up for "reward programs", don't give away your permanent email to any service. - Don't multitask yourself to uselessness (i.e. watching tv while working on your project with music playing and a game minimized you go into every 15 minutes while your paper's in front of you and you're baking cookies). ...You can sign up for my information overload program for just 3 easy payments of $49.9..just kidding. :P
It's nice to see everyone bashing our rich neighbor in Redmond.
The article, though, is a sales pitch. Uncle Bill is talking to a bunch of CEOs, and he's trying to do two things:
A) Trash Google and Yahoo and anyone else's desktop search program
B) Promote the windows environment and Microsoft's desktop search stuff.
Ultimately, the most annoying part of the whole article is the explicit point that Microsoft is primarily interested in developing software for the corporate world. So the ultimate bottom line for any development is how the new, human power elite accepts it. Sure the slaves in the trenches or in non-corporate fields suffer from information overload, increased stress and lack of concentration -- my life has become an anchorless drift across continents and task panes since Windows XP came out -- where was I? oh yeah -- but as long as the guy making decisions (who, as well all know, is always the worst informed. Hell he's buying microsoft products ain't he?) can yell at some slob and say "give me all my correspondence with Ballmer, except that april-fools yamauchi thing", and that slob can choke it up in the next 15 minutes, nobody suffers .
We are overloaded with data not information.
1) Make tasks easier to manage. Make it easier to enter task dates and improve the ability to link tasks to email messages. The ability to have super-tasks be made up of sub-tasks would be a great feature.
2) The idea of server-based Excel spreadsheets is intriguing. Unfortunately, the article does not go into any details about this. Excel could benefit from improved multi-user editing. The granularity of locking and editing needs to be increased. When more than one user works on a spreadsheet, instead of locking the whole thing, Excel should only lock smaller pieces. Built in version control, with formalized checkout, check-in, and merging of individual spreadsheet pieces, would make multi-user editing much easier to keep under control.
I think he is countering the notion that workers are overloaded with info
I think he's trying to get everybody all worried about overloading each other with information so that they'll think it's necessary to upgrade to Office 12. I mean, how many more new features are really necessary by most humans who work in an office environment?
Instead of adding a bunch of complicated features that solve contrived problems for a thin slice of Office users, I'd like to see them put some serious effort into making Word documents fully readable by any other version of Word. Imagine... you could send a document to another person without concern that it would be unreadable on their end... now that would be something to get excited about.
So anyway, yeah, the point of Gates' comments is less about substance and more about manipulating the market. He does this all the time, most recently with the "iPod will go away" comments. Ballmer is now doing it with "Google will be gone in 5 years". These guys know they are getting hammered by Apple and Google in specific market spaces, and rather than respond with better product offerings, they respond with subtle slander.
From tfa "the thing that comes in the latest is the one you shift your attention to" That reduces you to being a filing clerk. Or worse. At least a file clerk can prove that he gets his job done.
0 60 06.adp
The problem with the info glut is how we respond to it. If you let yourself get distracted by every little thing then your performance will suffer.
Recently there was a story that using email decreased your IQ worse than marijuana. That's true if you insist on answering every email the minute it comes in.
www.infoconomy.com/pages/news-and-gossip/group1
Any time I have to use a GUI to make a particular change, you as a developer have failed. Try to script configuration changes which require a GUI. Try to make those changes while logged in to a headless server using ssh.
Thomas
Or however you want to distinguish the two.
Data is facts.
Information is what you have when you process data.
It is possible to have too much data and not enough information. And that is the point we have hit. We can capture just about any amount of data on a subject, but we aren't getting any better information on that subject.
If you have enough data points, you will start to see patterns even when there aren't any.
That is data overload.
If you subscribe to the ideas laid out in "The Human Interface" the idea that people love to have a random information dumped onto them is not humane. People may want a ton of information but they don't want to spend time "ordering" it. Beyond this humans just can't handle giant lists disperate information well at all.
Consider your an audio ripping program. If a user were required to fully detail each file before they could listen to them in a player, one would spend all of their time typing information into each file instead of listening to the data. Filling out metadata seems to be a machine task not a user one. It is good to know what files where written by what artists. It is not good to force people to enter it. That would be tedious and prone to error: these are things machines actually excell at accomplishing so why make users do it?
Apple and Google have been putting tons of effort into making machines fill out the metadata instead of making users do it because it is really a task for the machine. If Gates expect users to fill out all of this stuff he is bonkers.
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