The Biggest Time Suck at the Office Might Be Your Computer (bloomberg.com)

Sharing personal anecdotes and recent studies, a new report on Bloomberg blames outdated computers, decade-old operating systems and ageing equipments for being one of the biggest hurdles that prevents people from doing actual work in their offices. From the article: Slow, outdated computers and intermittent internet connections demoralize workers, a survey of 6,000 European workers said. Half of U.K. employees said creaking computers were "restrictive and limiting," and 38 percent said modern technology would make them more motivated, according to the survey, commissioned by electronics company Sharp. Scott's (a 25-year-old researcher who works at an insurance firm) PC runs the relatively up-to-date Windows 8 operating system, but his computer sometimes struggles to handle large spreadsheets and multiple documents open simultaneously, slowing him down. Others are in a worse spot. One in every eight business laptops and desktops worldwide still run Windows XP, which was introduced in 2001. [...] Some businesses can't help using old hardware or operating systems, because they use specialized software that also hasn't been brought up-to-date.

Comments

Economics is hard

[TheRaven64]

The cost of a new high-end PC over a three-year lifetime is trivial compared to a typical office-worker salary. The cost of a decent chair over its 10-20 year lifetime is even smaller. Yet somehow companies refuse to spend 1% of a salary on something that will make people 5% more efficient.

Re:Economics is hard

[Brett Buck]

However, the cost of 3-6 months trying to get a new machine configured properly and the correct software installed is NOT trivial in terms of time wasted. And 3 months would be an optimistic estimate. The biggest time waste I see is the dreaded "refresh", where you have everything working, then someone comes around wanting to "upgrade" your machine, and then you spend weeks or months arguing with IT about which applications should be installed, finding that half your documents are corrupted because this version of WORD is incompatible with the last 5 (all of which are also incompatible with each other), and poking around the internet trying to troubleshoot because no one has any idea what to do about it.

Re:Big crock of bull

[holophrastic]

What a concept. We've eighty-seven thousand versions of microsoft office later. Does anyone's book report need anything newer than wordperfect? And if you thought that was dating myself, wordstar? It's black text on white page. Textart became useless when tractor-feed paper was gone -- you can't do banners on pre-cut paper. Count the number of office workers who use anything more than bold, italics, underline, a bulleted list, and maybe a numbered list. Even pivot tables have been around for decades now.

You need the latest hardware to run the latest software. But you don't need the latest software to do the latest business -- because the latest business, most of the time, is nothing new.