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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
"countering the notion that the workers today are not overloaded with information"
I think he is countering the notion that workers areoverloaded with info
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 So, my information could be wrong, out of date or otherwise inaccurate.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?
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.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
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.
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.
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
"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," Gates said. The result, he said, is that people either have to leave everything "in one big bucket" or they have to spend a lot of time creating lots of folders. "That turns you into a filing clerk."
How about hiring people that understand how to prioritize their own work? If someone can't figure out whether to run a report for their boss or send on a chain letter, I don't think a new version of Office is going to fix the problem.
The typical Web search takes 11 minutes these days. Gates acknowledged that that is a big improvement over search times and capabilities of a few years ago, when half of the searches didn't yield the needed information. He added, however, that a Web search is still a "treasure hunt" in which one hopes that the top few links contain the desired information.
Who the hell is taking 11 minutes to find what they want on the web. I timed myself just now, and I was looking at "hot teen lesbians" within 13 seconds. If that doesn't count for what people want on the web, I don't know what does. In 11 minutes, I could build my own website for it.
If I were to file this release into folders, it would probably go into my Marketing/Propaganda one.
/. ++
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 .
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."
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
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.
...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?
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Such as "How do I get Windows to the point where I'm not having to continually force quit stalled applications" or "Why on God's green Earth would Windows go out and waste my time trying to access a server pointed to by a shortcut I am telling it to delete, and then it bogs down because it can't find the server and does not realize that, well, that's why I want to DELETE THE FUCKING SHORTCUT!!!!" or "Why are most Cancel buttons in Windows cruel hoaxes?"
You know... little factoids like that.
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.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
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
SO true. Everybody knows that a desktop completely cluttered with retarded paperclips is the way to go!
By the way, if you switch the paperclip for the wizard, the messages become even more helpfull!!
Back to unix now, just to see what MAN remove_troll says...
http://jcsnippets.atspace.com/ - a collection of Java & C# snippets
You just don't need all those gauges, information is only useful if you can realistically process it.
Homer Simpson invented the 'everything's fine' alarm. It was a device that played an ear-piercing siren whenever everything was okay.
Wouldn't it be simpler to just have one of these installed in your car. that way, while the siren plays, you'll know that everything is fine.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
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.
'What if
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here is some of Gate's Bio. Incomplete of-course.
'Old Money' has nothing to do with computer industry. Gate's great-grandfather was J.W. Maxwell - founder of Seattle's National City Bank (1906). Gate's grandfather was James Willard Maxwell - banker, who established a million dollar trust for William (Bill) Henry Gates III.
From the article:
William Henry Gates, Jr. and Mary Maxwell were among Seattle's social and financial elite. Bill Gates, Jr. was a prominent corporate lawyer while Mary Maxwell was a board member of First Interstate Bank and Pacific Northwest Bell. She was also on the national board of United Way, along with John Opel, the chief executive officer of IBM who approved the inclusion of MS/DOS with the original IBM PC.
Remind your parents not to send you to public school. Bill Gates went to Lakeside, Seattle's most exclusive prep school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1760). Typical classmates included the McCaw brothers, who sold the cellular phone licenses they obtained from the U.S. Government to AT&T for $11.5 billion in 1994. When the kids there wanted to use a computer, they got their moms to hold a rummage sale and raise $3,000 to buy time on a DEC PDP-10, the same machine used by computer science researchers at Stanford and MIT.
and so on. Does this answer your question?
You can't handle the truth.
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.