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Google PAC-MAN Cost 4.8M Person-Hours
The folks at Rescue-Time, who make software that helps you (and companies) figure out how you spend your online time, did a modest calculation based on their user base and concluded that Google's playable PAC-MAN doodle cost the world over 4.8 million person-hours of productivity last Friday. "Google PAC-MAN consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6M daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day). $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, if the average Google user has a cost of $25/hr. (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate). For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get six weeks of their time."
Also, Google made the doodle permanent.
Well it seems I skewed the statistic quite a bit..
Now the real question is, how many more hours will it consume talking about how many hours it consumed?
Begs the question doesn't it?
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
... don't be evil, indeed...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
You should be ashamed of yourselves for reading my post when you should be off curing cancer or saving orphans or something useful!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
OK, so I'm just a really dumb C programmer, but I'm having a hard time parsing "cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate" and coming up with a value of $25/hr for any value of "pay rate". And I've wasted more time on this than I did futzing with Google's PacMan...
"The desperate marketing team at Rescue-Time, who spread FUD about how you spend your online time, did a flawed calculation based on wild speculation and concluded that Google's playable PAC-MAN doodle is the reason why we haven't cured cancer."
The first thing I said after wasting 15 minutes on Pac-Man was "I wonder if you could calculate how much money this game cost corporations around the world in wasted time?"
I still think it's worth going an extra mile to please our politically correct and feminist colleagues. After all it's not like it takes much effort and it does help create a happier and more harmonious workplace. That's why I prefer using the term bitch-hours. I hope it catches on.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
This is like all those bogus RIAA/MPAA/etc.-funded studies that assume a pirated copy is a lost sale. Much of the time spent on Google's PAC-MAN would otherwise have been spent on other internet time-wasting, not on productivity.
Great. Now some *AA is busy working on a study to show how much Google PAC-MAN cost them in sales. Way to go (don't expect to get paid for the idea though).
I kept wondering how the fuck a Google banner could be responsible for lost productivity. I am on Google all the time searching for stuff and saw it once and thought cool and moved on....
Till today when I found out it was fucking playable.
So yeah, there is going to be some lost productivity due to this, but it will take decades for Google to get anywhere near the records set by Minesweeper and Solitaire.
I thought, knowing Microsoft, that they would instead make a unique game featuring Clippy or Bob or that little dog. And the object of the game would be to defeat the evil free-software hordes.
[Dr. Evil voice] My most diabolical plan ever, wherein I will unleash on the world a computer program that will drain the world's productivity. Think of it. Meeleeyuns of hours of productivity sucked way by my marvelous creation... [/Dr. Evil voice]
It doesn't matter if your life is boring. Wasting time on games, or anything non-work-related, is stealing from your employer. Get back to work!
-- Management
I agree - especially given that these "People" wasting "Person-Hours" are not playing "Pac-Person".
Pac-person - a gender neutral abstract object of a neutral colour moves around a maze not eating vegan dots (or stripes) while not antagonising the neutral "ghosts" (or any ethereal creature) who wish only to have lunch with Pac-person and not harm them in any way. Game does not include a "score" function as scores are considered "competitive" and detract from the non-judgmental attitude of the Pac-person game.
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
How much did people urinating cost?
I'd say it cost R Kelly a great deal.
I thought we were. We reliably convert coffee and donuts into Powerpoint slides and meetings.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
That's true, you can't monetize person-hours unless you know the opportunity cost of that time. If those hours would have been spent watching TV, it's cost neutral (1 hour of leisure time either way.) Were executives and sales reps playing it work? That's a cost benefit. It saved the hours spent removing viruses and malware they would have downloaded surfing porn sites instead.
Yeah, but when you see a number like $298,803,988, it seems a shame to just round it off to the nearest hundred million or so, what with the vast loss of accuracy that would entail.
If you tell my youngest to draw a fireman/firefigher he'll just as likely draw a car with a clown driving it
... and will go on to explain that the clown *is* actually a fireman, but he's a clown as well and isn't on fireman duty today. Yeah, sounds a bit familiar.