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New Digital Technology Can, in Some Circumstances, Make Businesses Less Productive (bloomberg.com)
In a poll of 20,000 European workers released Monday, Microsoft, which became one of the world's most profitable companies by marketing office productivity software, acknowledges new digital technology can, in some circumstances, make businesses less productive. From a report: Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft joins a growing number of prominent Silicon Valley companies and entrepreneurs that are starting to question the social benefits of the technology they once championed. Facebook warned in December that its social network might, in some cases, cause psychological harm. Microsoft identifies a number of possible reasons for this negative impact, including: workers who are too distracted by a constant influx of e-mails, Slack messages, Trello notifications, texts, Tweets -- not to mention viral cat videos -- to concentrate for sustained periods; workers who aren't properly trained to use the new technology effectively; tech that isn't adequately supported by the business, forcing workers to lose time because "the computers are down;" and workers who suffer burnout because, with mobile devices and at-home-working, they feel tethered to the job around-the-clock.
...and inflicting mouse-driven GUI lunacy on corporations. In all cases, it seemed employees "could do more," but really they "had to do more" because of the new technology. There was the birth of incessant goofing off with solitaire, personal email, social media, ebay, etc. Then companies had to install all kinds of complicated stuff to block, monitor, and mitigate their companies screwing off with their tech. I road the "it must be better because you told me so" $ train for years selling that crap.
I'm not anti-tech to the point of living in a cabin and abusing postal mail, but I do think for many, many purposes, a terminal-based application running off a dedicated host (or cluster of hosts) provides a company with a far more efficient, both in direct & indirect costs, system to accomplish a business goal than all these multi-purpose general-purpose GUI desktop OS's.
Example: I have one customer that had a UNIX terminal and hand scanner system to manage a large network of warehouses and light manufacturing at various geographical locations. They (the accounts and executives) decided the yearly maintenance costs of the UNIX application vendor were too high, so they were going to modernize it. They ended up buying a farm of Windows servers and Windows desktops everywhere (with all the obligatory firewalls, AV, employee monitoring stuff they needed to make their employees actually use the stuff for work) and spent enough money (up front, not planned ongoing costs) to fund 10 years worth of the original UNIX application vendor's maintenance fees.
Worst part: under UNIX terminal system they used hand and forklift scanners with telnet to scan inventory and logistics moves. These cost at most $1000 in the highest complexity scenario; usually about $750 in routine cases. With the new system, every mobile production location needed $6000 Windows hand-held terminals so they could RDP into the fancy smancy Windows terminal farm, all so they could scan 2-D bar codes on supplies and inventory as it moved around the organization. Lunacy.
We were a happier civilization as Cave Men
The Ribbon made me switch to Open Office. Though these days I use Libre Office because it seems like it's more stable on a Mac.
The other amazing thing is how MS Office went from much faster than the free alternative to much slower.
So much slower than the free alternative. And has a more irritating UI. I guess in retrospect you could see we'd reached peak Microsoft.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
That's the thing, often new tech can NOT be introduced into an existing workplace without introduce new employees who actually know how to use it.
Look, I'm not that old, but one of my clients hired this 20 year old girl who wanted us to switch to Slack and Asana to do things, from our previous Skype+email system. While I did like slack better than Skype, everything else became harder to manage from Slack, and pretty much nobody paid attention to Asana.
Which is to say, you can not replace your organizations communication tools if you don't train them on it. When I worked for eBay (before they bought Skype) everyone was using MSN messenger, the minute we had Skype everyone was told to use Skype or else. However the web-browser based customer-facing Email client was slow as ass, and people preferred using the much older email client because it was less buggy and worked better with the macros.
In another example with AT&T, they replaced AXYS with SIEBEL, and god damn everyone hated that thing.
Even my dad's office back in 1996 resisted Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Office. It was not what they were used to.
Every time you change things, you lose productivity if you don't retrain your staff on it. This goes double for software products like Microsoft Office that staff spend a lot of time in front of, but don't use any of the bells and whistles of for fear of losing time asking for help.
Social media, is harmful, very harmful. Especially in places like Schools and Government offices. While they do offer a good way to interact with customers, customers are often not very thankful for it. But when you interact with students and teachers, and bureaucrats, you will get nothing but hate.
I wish I had mod points, I would mod you up.
> Every time you change things, you lose productivity if you don't retrain your staff on it.
In the last 15 years, I have never seen a company retrain their staff for new technology. They simply throw it out there, send out a memo about how great it is, and move on. They expect everyone to figure it out on their own.