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."

Comments

No such thing as too much information

[akadruid]

No such thing as too much information, just information which is badly organised.

I am connected to a web with a lot of gigabytes of data - the Internet. It's a lot of data, but with the right tools and knowledge, it's not useless.

It's when you factor in using the wrong tools, lack of knowledge and malicious attempts to attract your attention that you get information overload.

It's an overrated buzzword anyway. It seems to be most used for the same reason the previous generation complained about the pace of life being quicker these days.

Hmmmm

[Philosinfinity]

One of the things I find interesting about this is that Gates holds the exact opposite paradigm about work that Plato holds in the Republic. But this brings up an interesting question. Do workers need knowledge of the whole system or just what their portion of it is?

In many cases, things fall through the cracks when the right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing. However, is that a causal relationship or a correlative one? I think that a strong corporate heirarchy where managers *gasp* are well trained employees that have moved through the system and proved that they are capable of seeing a picture bigger than "insert part A in slot B," is much more likely to not have the same sort of issues that a less well managed company would (assuming of course that the actual workers have very little clue what is going on outside of their area). Again, to bring up Plato, I think he is correct to say that people are happier when they are able to specialize in a specific task and work toward the perfection of said task. This does not mean that they cannot move up, but that the base job is a platform to the next level.

However, Gates is in an itneresting position. Software problems can be directly attributed to having too many programmers working in too small of a scope. When they lack the information to understand exactly how their code is part of the whole, they make mistakes.

But well coded, well documented, libraries, functions, programs, etc. should provide enough information for those who utilize the code to understand exactly how it will work within their project. Again, I think a well informed management that actually does work is a much better structure than building a staff of well informed workers from the ground up.

Information Overload

[TheDawgLives]

If office doesn't cause information overload, then why does M$ have to hide all the extranious menu options by default. I tire of telling users to click on such and such a menu and they come back with "I don't have that."

I can't figure out

[el_womble]

...if I have a serious problem. I spend my whole day filtering information, code, tech manuals, slashdot etc. and only taking in the bits that I think are useful/interesting/funny. If I miss something I figure I can always go back and read it again.

The problem is I can't switch it off. I skim everything, and now the problem is spreading: it's affecting my listening too! I have to really focus on someone to take in everything they tell me, especially people I listen too a lot, like my girlfriend. If she is talking to me about something 'really important', like shopping, holidays, TV or hair and my brain doesn't agree how important it is I simply don't hear what she's saying. What worse is that she has a typical female ability to multiplex two or more streams of information, one of which might actually be important. This has lead to all sorts of arguments.

Does this affect anyone else?

Re:I can't figure out

[GPLDAN]

It's happening to me as well. I used to be known growing up in my teens and 20s as somebody with a huge attention span. I could lose myself in work and not come up for 12-24 hours or more. And, as I've gone into my 30's, it's been harder and harder to do.

I've started hyperlinking my brain. I hear snippets of what people are telling me, I free associate during a conversation, I tune out my wife (most of the time with good reason) but even during important lectures or trainings, I start needing to check my laptop or my PDA.

I've consdiered resorting to meditation to help me stop the inner dialog and outwardly focus on things. I picked up my O'Reilley Advanced Perl Prrogramming book last night, because yet again I was struggling with references (pointers) and the book at one point just faded into symbols. I couldn't force myself to concentrate and read the code. Ok, perl can be like that sometimes, but this was TEXTBOOK perl, so it was supposed to be readable and understandable. But I couldn't focus on it.

I think I need to do something. I don't know what. Historically, reading a long book of non-fiction, like a biography, over the course a day or so sitting outside, has helped alot.

He's fallen prey to one of the classic blunders

[blueZ3]

The first is: Never get involved in a land war in Asia. But only slightly less well-known: Never use a non sequitur, when Death is on the line!

"...workers today are not overloaded with information." and "We still want a lot of information."

Hello? Can you say "Unrelated statements"? The fact that we want "a lot" of information does not preclude information overload.

The useful bit of information we want is (usually) a nugget that has to be carefully sifted from the deluge of meaningless noise that constantly flows through our every-day lives. These days, I'm finding that filtering out the noise now takes almost as long as accomplishing the task that I'm looking for information to complete.

How many of us waste a good deal of time each day dealing with spam? I'm not talking about "spam" in the classic sense; I get a lot of what I call "internal spam" where someone thinks it's important to tell me about things that have zero impact on my particular work... Or what about your organization's Intranet? Is it well-organized? Can you find the information you need without sifting through piles of marketing drek?

In any event, this is one of those situations where failing to acknowledge the problem could quite well be one of its symptoms. There's so much noise that the you think you're getting 100% of the signal.

Security vulnerabilities make money for Microsoft.

[Futurepower(R)]

'What if ..."the thing that comes in the latest" is a warning of gaping security hole in your browser?'

For Bill Gates, it makes sense to have huge security vulnerabilities. Most people who have a huge amount of spyware and viruses notice that their computer is slow and buy another computer, thus making more money for Gates, because he then sells another copy of Windows. So, for Gates, there is hidden logic in selling the most vulnerable commonly used program in history, Internet Explorer. This vicious, hostile trick only works if most people are ignorant about what is causing their computer to be slow.

Your sig is interesting. Another seemingly wildly illogical issue:

On 9/11, 15 of the 18 attackers were Saudis. However, the U.S. invaded Iraq.

When Saudis attack, invade Iraq? Actually, that's not illogical, it is just that the logic is hidden. People in the U.S. now get some of the profit from Iraqi oil. Before they didn't.

For a president who comes from an oil family and a vice-president who worked for an oil company, it makes sense to use the attack by Saudis, angry at U.S. government influence on their country, to justify an attack on an oil-rich country.

This only works, of course, if most citizens in the U.S. are unaware of the largely secret U.S. government meddling, for private profit, in the affairs of other countries.

Completly OT

[protolith]

The reason for an Iraq invasion is actually quite clever. It was not really about Iraqi oil. The reason the terrorists used mainly Saudis in 9/11, was an attempt to turn America against its closest ally in the Middle East, that fat oil tit, Saudi Arabia. The fundamentalist Islamic movement in the Middle East really wanted the region in chaos in an attempt to gain hold. Attacking the US in a spectacular way guaranteed our play on the field. We have no intention of carrying on a conflict on our own soil. Instead of making the move they hoped to provoke, we attacked Afghanistan. They wanted war in the Middle East, we gave it to them. The Taliban weren't making many friends in the international community at the time. Had we left it alone as only an invasion of Afghanistan we would have likely incurred another attack on US soil, in further attempt to provoke an attack on Saudi Arabia. In order to keep the war in the Middle East and not destroy our alliance with Saudi Arabia, we invaded Iraq. This allowed for some exercise of back pocket agenda to oust Saddam, but really directed all attention of the terrorists off US soil and into the Middle East. The fact that Iraq has oil, is really just gravy in the whole scheme of things. If war in the middle east was only about taking oil for the US, Kuwait would be the 51st state in the union.