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Fred Moody on the Solow Paradox, MS
lactose_intolerant was one of the several trillion who wrote to us with Fred Moody's last column. It's a little ditty delving into why Solow Paradox's (despite computers, workers' productivity has not increased) exists. Hint: It's got something to do with a crashing operating system. Of course, that doesn't explain why productivity wasn't rising pre-Windows, but c'est la vie.
Sir, I implore you, the Return Key! Hit it on occasion!
-Markvs
..."4 out of 5 people think the 5th one is an idiot."
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
If you ask me, if they insisted on moving GUI into the kernel, they should've only put it into the NT Workstation product (if that!) and left NT Server in the slow-but-stable configuration.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
I always, always make back-ups to. All it takes is one person to overwrite your document (esp if you're not using CVS or something like that) and *poof*. Save! CRTL+S! Is it so hard? I learned the hard way after losing several graphics that I had been working on for a long time - if I remembered to save every 10 mins in that case - wow, what a difference!
Moody is just trolling and/or trying to gain hits from the Slashdot Effect. His estimated cost of crashes is unsubstantiated: pure fiction. I am not a Windows fan or anything, but Moody clearly did no research for this "opinion." He just wrote down the first thing that popped into his head.
Simple. 95/98/NT has a MUCH lower learning curve than any of those systems you mentioned, and is also many, many times cheaper too.
:-)
Add in that OS/2 didn't have developer support (and was even more resouce intensive than M$) and Mac had 4 bad CEOs in a row, and well... what do you get? Linux is great. But my Mom can't use it until is becomes less technoese.
-Markvs
..."If the plural of mouse is mice, what is the plural of spouse?"
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
Ok I'm sold!
Let's see, I have 100 users and a 10 user license for NT is $984.28. Totalling $9842.80. My Red Hat disk cost about $80.00.
Uhhh, never mind.
When a good admin implements it with solid hardware, NT is very stable. How's that?
-witz0r
What you are talking about is manufacturing capacity, and you're right, overcapacity is bad, what Solow was talking about was profit per employee which should be the final result of productivity gains. That we want as much of as we can get.
By the way, I'd bet dollars to donuts that China's problems don't stem from a lack of market controls but from their top down command economy.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
The OS itself doesn't have memory leaks, that's just plain wrong. The OS used to, and they were patched. Poorly written applications do. Run away processes are easily killed with the "kill" application that can even kill system services.
"Productivity" is simply "how much you produce, per unit time, for which you can obtain goods and services." (Or, "so you can accomplish your goal," whatever.) Being a per-unit-time thing, it says absolutely nothing about how much time you spend, nor how hard you worked while spending it.
The hacker who develops a tool to automate part of her work makes herself more productive, so she can go home sooner, or so she can get on to the next hack. Anyone who cares about what she's doing wants to be more productive at it. Accusing her of therefore being a brainwashed tool of The Man is silly.
Huh? Are you familiar with the term (in common usage into the early 20th century) "from can-see to can't-see?" It refers to the work schedule for preindustrial agriculture: predawn to postdusk.
Well, no. There were always people who lived to be a hundred, but most were dead before 40, and most of those died before 7, or at birth, taking their mothers with them. Visit any pre-1850 cemetery: A lot of men are buried next to their successive wives and their infant childen -- and those were the people who could afford headstones.
People had worse teeth in Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky, but in real life they didn't soak their mouths in nearly as much sugar and acid as we do. Moderns can do more for their teeth when they go bad, but they go bad much more.
Modern life is hard and stressful in unique ways, but reactionary longings for a golden age gone by are a waste of time.
Personally, I think this is off-topic, but the top of this thread got moderated up.
If your father had called ahead, they could have saved him the trip if it wasn't in stock...
If the clerk was new and didn't know where everything was yet...
If you father will be a regular customer and they garden supply house sets up an extranet that lets him check the inventory himself and preorder so that it is waiting on the loading dock when he gets there...
Your fathers pruning shears are great, so long as he keeps them sharp and uses them correctly. Dull shears used wrong could damage the plant more and take longer than ripping the branches off.
Computerization, in and of itself, does not improve a poor process or break a good one.
If you had my real name, you'd use an alias too.
No, our systems are ghosted and identical and just don't crash often. Users are instructed to call the helpdesk when they crashed (EVERY time). They're plain-jane IBM machines running Windows 95 (standard installs, policied so they can't install other apps that can cause crashes). Most of the crashes are due to hardware and the machines are promptly fixed.
Maybe we're just lucky, but this is how I thought a network is supposed to be run.
True, compared to previous versions of NT, 4.0 is much much better. However there are some rather disturbing things that my co-workers and I have noticed.
1) User programs are allowed to write to the system directory. This can probably be stopped by setting the permissions of winnt\system[xx] but this keeps a lot of programs from installing at all.
2) NT 4.0 occasionally doesn't know that a process is gone. We've noticed this mostly with IE4, MSDev, and just a handful of others. Since they don't showup in the process list, it's unlikely that it's the app's fault. Anyone know more?
3) (Secutiry & a little off topic) Anyone can take ownership of files. I'm a little foggy on this point. I haven't tested it thoroughly. But, it seems that, as documented, any user can take ownership of a file. Hmmm... Can anyone tell me this isn't so? (Please do)
All in all, my experience is that MS OSes are far *FAR* from being the "install and walk away" boxes a previous poster claimed.
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
To answer some of your concerns, broter:
:)
1) Proper permissions can manually be set. Win2k has an automatic tightening procedure that addresses this. There is also a utility in the WinNT Reskit that can do this. NT Server, of course, allows full access to everyone on the whole drive (via NTFS permissions). This is because users should not be allowed to log on locally to NT Server(and aren't by default).
2) What do you mean by "a process is gone"? Are you talking about processes listed in task manager that aren't visible to you? That's just the opposite, it SHOULD be gone, but NT is telling you that it really isn't. IE seems to occasionally do this. Outlook does this if you close it while it's checking/downloading/uploading mail.
3) Ownership is meaningless in NTFS permissions. Administrators can take full control of any object that has an ACL (unlike Netware, which does allow administrative lockouts). A regular user without explicit permissions on a file cannot take it over...I'm not sure why you're seeing this. Permission has to be given somewhere...it could be on a higher level directory if the permissions are inherited onto the object they're attempting to take over.
Maybe I just confused you more
As a hardened windows programmer, I can assure you that it's accurate. A common problem with developing on Win32 (with MSDev products) is that when things go wrong they tend to go whacky!
Frequently, installing a tool will change a system dll. This has undefined results.
If you're doing a long term test, it can get difficult to tell whether your code is buggy, or if NT is just going wierd. I've seen some very good programmers go nuts over this.
Let me qualify this: it's not all the OS's fault. A lot of it is the build environment, other apps, & the million+ lines of code you're compiling. But then, the OS should be solid enough to let user apps go totally berzerk and not die a terrible death.
I'm not trying to say anything about the common clerk plugging away at a Word document. I haven't been around them much and don't know how MS OSes act there. The closest I've been to taht is ISP tech support. Quite frankly, if I never do tech support for Win95/98 or the ilk again, it will be too soon.
(Also, it's funny that me writing this is contributing to the lack of productivity...)
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
Productivity is not profits. Productivity is output divided by labor used to produce it. There are several measures of productivity in use. One is GDP divided by size of the labor force. Output for manufacturing is generally easy to calculate. It is the value of product produced. The problem is the definition of output for service industries. It is generally taken to be the cost of the inputs. Spending more in a service industry to get more value per worker actually decreases productivity as we currently measure it. Here's a link to a paper on the problems with interpreting Productivity Stastistics and a short quote.
Zvi Griliches (1994) presented some evidence on the plausibility of the mismeasurement view. He classified output into sectors that were relatively "measurable," such as manufacturing, and "unmeasurable," such as finance. He then noted that the fraction of output in measurable sectors had declined over time.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Cool, thanks. That actually answers quite a few of my questions.
For the record, NT occationally gives the "shall I wait?" dialog box when you execute a forced shutdown via the API. That's my main gripe.
Sorry for the confusion.
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
Yup the article was pretty bogus but let me ask you a question about the rest of your statement.
If we assume that people will pay more for a superior product then why hasn't the superior automobile you are now able to design led to greater profits? And if improving quality doesn't lead to greater profits where is the incentive to improve quality?
Here's two possible answers for you:
1) GM and Chrysler have both posted record profits in recent years.
2) In a near monopolistic market there is little incentive to improve quality, but when you have high quality asian and european competitors a failure to improve quality will result in a LOSS of profits, so you find yourself running faster just to stand still.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
Solow's paradox was true at the time, (1987) but it ain't so no mo...
Most PC's used DOS, and people had a lot of trouble with command line interfaces. I know because I supported them. (backslash? c prompt? say what?) Also, there were few productivity gains back then because people got so little for the money. A 16mhz 386 with 1mb was hot stuff, and cost $5k or so. People had to be taught "how to work a computer", and this cost more money. Today, "computer illiteracy" is kind of like "automobile illiteracy".
Fred is wrong. His "analysis" presumes that users NEVER learn to save stuff, and ALWAYS need 2 hrs to recover. Not true. Yes, Windows does crash too often, etc., and there are better operating systems out there, but many people can go days (days!!) without losing documents and needing 2 hours to recover.
We have had thousands and thousands of people downsized over the years, and many (most?) of them did actual work that their company still needed to have done after they were fired. Somebody picked up the slack, and it wasn't all done by making the survivors ever harder. The survivors got more efficient, managers learned to type, etc.
the operating system...the Kernel...is a very stable and solid product. My desktop crashes periodically, but if you're smart, you just restart it (a.k.a. kill the explorer process.) The active desktop is crap (web page desktop). It kept crashing my desktop process. The desktop process I guess would be analagous to an X window manager???
It's all of the other MS crap that causes so much trouble. Excel is constantly crashing. Access has the ability to bring a system to a halt. I was glad to see that the new Access is multithreaded, but I'm sure it has the same problems. Internet Explorer I find is a solid program.
But, take some mission critical software:
Exchange Server freaks out all the time.
SQL Server 7.0 is S#1T. It's got a gigantic memory leak. Download a table in access and used memory goes up by a couple hundred megabytes! I guess we'll have to wait until service pack 5,000 to fix that one.
Proxy Server is not too good either. It's a pain to configure, for one thing.
etc. etc.
So, the point is that those NT Kernel people at Microsoft are doing a decent job and balme the OS when the real problem is the OS.
Sure it is. A crash per day is too much even for statistics :)
On the other hand, Solow Paradox exists. Well, they say it does....
I think this happens because (not to claim to be an expert) the overall productivity is a sum of, at least, two values- 'tool' productivity and 'human' productivity. The first one is growing since Stone Ages, and we haven't reached a limit in improvement of our tools. Technology still has a way to go and a room to play.
In the meantime, psychology and physiology put their limits on productivity. We need to sleep, to eat, to rest etc. And we are still unable to use our brain at 100% of its power. I expect in the nearest future humankind will face previously unknown problems and main efforts will be concentrated on unleashing the power of mind.
Just IMHO....
KuroiNeko
Productivity has not increased ... kind of an all emcompasing saying, akin to "Music has not gotten more complex since 1800".
....
But this is my take:
Projects are getting bigger and bigger, and more information is needed to tackle any given project. Just like it may have taken us a few months to build a house back in 1900, now that we have more tools, we build more complex and bigger houses. So the end product takes the same amount of time to build. But the resultant product is more complex anyhow
"Old man yells at systemd"
Actually, it's "C'est la vie."
"Ce la vie" no verb.
:)
Frankly it seems that this time a lot of people came in to hold up on Windows. Good thing as Linux frantics were becoming quite monotonous.
But unfortunately your Windows hype is no better than the Linux one. Frankly, Windows doesn't crash? IT CRASHES AND CRASHES BADLY! But these crashes also are dependent on many things. My work environment does not live with Windows and that's the reason I left M$ world. But I would not recomend 80% of users to do the same thing. And maybe 50% of them may live under Windows without problems. Meanwhile the other 50% may need to start thinking about Linux in the future...
from the article If you remove computer manufacturing from the rest of the information economy, Gordon writes, productivity since 1995 "has been abysmal rather than admirable."
important part here "since 1995"
also from the article Nobel laureate and economist Robert Solow, in what The Economist calls "the Solow paradox," noted a few years ago that "you can see the computer age everywhere these days except in the productivity statistics."
important part here "noted a few years ago"
This seems to put net access back in the running for the "recent" uselessness (in a productivity sense), since Solow's studies and the paradox wouldn't include it as a factor, and the other data is within the 'Nets "useful" time period.
One thing. surprisingly, not noted in the article, old Gordo's law. Which I would now take to mean, every 18 months I have to figure out something else to seem to be doing while my computer works twice as fast. Which would actually coincide nicely with the Slow Paradox (misspelled for flavor)
+&x
I also remember there was a followup letter to the editor that pointed out that this only applies to office workers. Engineers and scientists have gotten HUGE productivity gains from workstations.
The real culprit is the net, as the /.'ers are all so aware. :)
Microsoft® has created a program that can do the work of 10 office employees - problem is it takes 30 office employees to run it.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Dude... 3 grand is nothing. The products engineers sell typically price higher than a McCheesburger and McFries, yunno.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
This isn't inefficiency of technology, it's inefficiency of process. Every auto parts store I've been to, I ask for the part, they yank it off the shelf immediately if they know exactly what I'm asking for while the other guy at the counter punches it in. Then when the part gets up to the counter, he compares the part numbers and hands it to me where I take it to the checkout. The part has a box or a tag that's barcoded.
If there's only one guy at the distributorship and people are lining up waiting for a long time, then they're simply understaffed.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
One crash a day is a pretty wild number, way high. I supported Windows, hated every minute of having to deal with this awful perpetually broken brittle piece of crap operating system. But if someone's computer crashed every single day, damn straight they'd be calling the helpdesk eventually, and I can tell you we didn't get calls from every single person in the company.
Geez, he can't even get slashdot to agree with him on this one...
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Productivity is a measure of the dollar value produced by the median worker in a field. You compare productivity of two different times by multiplying the dollar value produced by each worker by an inflation factor. So several things can be improperly measured: the amount of value produced by the worker, the inflation factor, how many people are in a field, etc.
I beleive productivity has increased, and the reason that it is not measured is because the value of the dollar has actually been increasing. Economists use the Consumer Price Index among other tools to judge the value of a dollar. This usually means seeing how much a dollar will buy you today as opposed to yesterday.
One thing that the CPI cannot measure is the quality of the goods you are buying. If a car lasts twice as long now as it did 10 years ago, is it not worth 1.5 to 2 times as much? If a car only costs 1.25 times as much now as it did 10 years ago, then then we have experienced _deflation_, the value of the dollar has actually increased rather than decreased. So a worker who built a car today is only credited with the current cost of the car, when in reality the price of the car has remained about the same while its value has increased dramatically.
Also, the CPI does not take into account the value of being able to buy new alternatives to old goods that can be much cheaper, and new goods and services that never existed before. VCR's made viewing movies much cheaper, but the CPI failed to properly take this into account.
So my basic argument boils down to: the productivity increases have not manifested themselves as much in quantity of goods produced per man-hour but the quality and variety of goods.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
> No internet access at home, eh?
Access? Yes. T1? No.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I do agree that the "lost" productivity is probably going into hard to measure areas.
On the topic of MS OSes, having dealt with Countrywide Home Loans' database and internet departments I'm not so sure that you're company's experience with MS OSes is too universal. They had top of the line hardware in happy little server farms with MS employees on site to boot [sic]. But it was still a hassle. As I've mentioned in previous posts, every Friday (or was it Sunday?) was reboot night in the server room. SQL Server had many problems too.
If this was just an application problem, like another poster suggested, you should be able to reclaim that lost memory by stopping and restarting the process. The OS should know what belongs to it and throw it back into the unused bit bucket. That simply doesn't happen.
I'm trying to be a fair-minded optimist. Maybe W2K *will* fix the problems that traditionally plague Windoze boxes. MS has hired a *lot* of great programmers. Until I see it for myself, I'll keep all of my vital programs and data on a unix flavour.
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
Compare with my counterparts who run NT, each of whom has had to reinstall their operating system anywhere from once to 6 times during the same interval. That's in addition to "futzing" with new drivers (for bug fixes), application upgrades/reinstalls, and the like. Not to mention recovering from random BSODs as often as once a week.
I'm sure Macs are fine, too, but don't think that just because you can configure a Linux system as much as you want, it means that you have to do it.
--
This is why I don't post much.
Right... And if you were running equivalents on ;-) Seriously, whether or not an
;) Anyone out there "competent"
the same hardware under a *NIX OS, it would be
overpowered.
equivalent *NIX box would perform as well, it
would most certainly not crash merely by having
"too many" server apps running on it. This is
a perfect example of the NT apologist mindset.
That, and "you must be incompetent if your NT
box is crashing!" C'mon guys, these are pitiful
excuses. That and the assertion that if you had
only installed SP5 (you buffoon), your box would
suddenly become well-behaved. Even if true,
aren't we glossing over NT's previous state of
broken-ness waaay far back in SP4 times? Gee, how
long ago was that?
You folks claiming to keep NT boxes up for eons
are either lying, very forgetful, or possessing
some great secret that I'm sure many others here
would like you to share. Which is it?
And concerning the distribution of incompetents
in the IT business... If so many are having
trouble keeping their NT boxes from crashing and
so few have such problems under a *NIX OS, doesn't
that mean that NT is the preferred OS of morons?
;-) That still doesn't explain away the crashing
however, as I though IT morons was exactly the
target market for NT. And heck, if you hafta be
an expert at it, why not run an OS that's
friendly to experts instead of morons?
Ok, a few low-blows there I grant you. And one
more:
Red Hat Linux release 4.0 (Colgate)
Kernel 2.0.30 on an i486
login: cwilkins
Password:
Last login: Fri Aug 20 17:01:27 from xxx.xxx.185.107
[cwilkins@wabbit ~]$ uname -a
Linux wabbit.is.xxx.xxx 2.0.30 #1 Mon Jun 9 10:38:03 EDT 1997 i486
[cwilkins@wabbit ~]$ uptime
5:11pm up 400 days, 1:12, 7 users, load average: 0.05, 0.01, 0.00
[cwilkins@wabbit ~]$
400 days. That's an old 486/66 box with RedHat4.0
(Service Pack 0
enough to beat that number on _any_ NT box?
-- Charlie Wilkinson Freelance Deity - Fire & Brimstone in Stock - Smiting While-U-Wait!
I have had the pleasure of using Windows 95 and 98 for several large CGI projects & web sites. I've also had the pleasure of seeing the system go down on me anywhere from 1 to 5+ times a day, not to mention the countless times I had to restart b/c the system would slow down to the point where the mouse was lagged and it took 5 seconds to redraw the screen.
I guess the consequences of computers crashing are not as much as mangled or lost documents but rather frustration resulting from the person having to boot back up, wait a minute for scandisk to check for errors, open up all the folders, editors, and apps again, open the last saved version of the document, etc. The frustration makes it hard to get into the "working mood" again and makes you feel like quitting. Trust me, I know.
Even worse, if you work on your document non-linearly (ie. not typing an essay but jumping around a program's source code, making changes here and there), trying to figure out what you've already done and what you need to do to the document after you load it from an old saved version can be a bitch.
Eat shit! A hundred billion flies can't be wrong!
>Three good reasons why productivity hasn't increased much in the >workplace since computers were introduced.
There's a fourth reason why "productivity" hasn't increased much.
4. People discovered that they had no real need or use for the so-called "productivity" software that was being hyped at them....
How do you know there aren't any in Linux? Or UX? Or FreeBSD? Or any other OS? You only know what's documented.
Productivity? Who cares about that?
Wasn't this modern technological society supposed to make life easier? Wasn't automation supposed to mean that we would have more time to play instead of work? Yet people today are working as hard (or harder, depending on what you read) than people did in pre-industrial times. Yeah, we live a little longer (arguably -- opinions differ) and we have better teeth (no question), but the ``Protestant Work Ethic'' still has us working like slaves instead of doing what we really want to do. It's gotten so bad that a lot of people think that what they want to do is fnord ``be a productive member of society!''
Still, there's a lot of cool stuff you can buy, isn't there?
Have you SEEN what Terminal Services and MetaFrame do to NT? It is almost required that they be rebooted nightly, otherwise they slow down to the point of unusability, which takes about three days.
Surely you jest. At my location, we have problems with our NT servers due to problems with NT that M$ knows about, and described in the following knowledge base articles: Q196745 ("Very slow paged pool leak in Windows NT 4.0") and Q185211 ("Non-Paged Pool Memory Leak in COMX Pool Tag.")
The first one says that it is a known problem, and to install the latest service pack... well, we installed SP5, and the leak is still there! I noted that the article never said that the service pack fixed the problem. It has been a known bug since SP4.
Article on the non-paged pool leak seems to have disappeared recently from the M$ knowledgebase. Fortunately, I have a printout. The status is: "M$ has confirmed this to be a problem in Windows NT version 4.0. We are researching this problem and will post new information here ... as it becomes available."
If you read the article on the paged pool leak, you will see that if you have the situation described, YOU CANNOT KEEP NT SERVER UP FOR MORE THAN A WEEK. And there is no workaround. There isn't even a fix for the non-paged pool leak.
So, don't question my competency, when the problems are not fixable by me, and M$ hasn't gotten off their ass and fixed it.
If we had the source code, it'd be fixed. HAIL LINUX!
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
yeah, I'd have to agree with this guy. two hours seems a bit extreme. and as much as I'd love to bash Windoze for its instability, this summer I realized that it didn't seem to crash all too often. hardly ever, really. *however*, I just got back to school and got my network hooked up again, and it's back to crashing 5 times a day. my suspicions have been confirmed, the network is the problem. Word never seemed to crash, Quake 2 either (expect network games, or when I switched back to the desktop a few times and the video got screwed up). Ah well, back to good old reliable (cough) CWRUnet. (hey, it's got an entry on Everything.
(yes, I realize it probably would be a *lot* more stable if I switched from ATM to plain old boring ethernet, but I like to go fast.
--- this comment is presented in WIDE SCREEN STEREO!!!
My Mac crashed constantly:
A typical web dev session:
Open Photoshop, Open Illustrator, Open EMACS, do some stuff, Open Navigator, Open Graphics Converter, Close Illustrator (low on memory), Close Graphic Converter, Open Illustrator, Go to Navigator and hit refresh....Error of Type 2 occurred...Reload Navigator, [continue in a similar fashion], THE POINTER FREEZES, Reboot (5 minutes), start all over again
Of course, I saved before I switched between applications, so I didn't loose anything major, but the Mac does crash often when you are using it.
I develop for the Web using Linux now, and it never crashes or gives me trouble. I did have to cut some flips to get the Gimp to work, though, so it's not perfect.
I so COMPLETELY agree with you. People are people. They aren't computers. If doing work is something they enjoy they'll get a lot done. If not, they'll limit the amount of work they do in a day.
Teach a man to dish and he will gossip for life.
........Joke collumn
By that do you mean the article by Mr. Moody, or your post?
I do disagree with his estimate of a two-hour recovery time, but I would be happy if Windows only crashed once per day. As it turns out, when I actually am working in Windows, it tends to crash every few hours.
Why, you ask, do I "tolerate MS siftware"? Because the programs I need to run don't exist on other platforms. (Maybe I can get away with WINE in the future, but right now it doesn't run the last few versions of the programs I use on a daily basis.) "Complain! Write to the company making the program and tell them to support other platforms!" Well guess what? They used to support other platforms (specifically Macintosh), but after those OS's shares of the market dropped below 10% combined, they wisely saw the cost-benefit ratio disappear and dropped everything except Windows 9x/NT. (The company of which I speak is Autodesk, maker of AutoCAD -- but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, as far as I have heard from company reps Autodesk hasn't supported MacOS for at least five releases now.)
If you truly get uptimes with Windows that amount to months on end, I applaud you. I'd also like to know how you do it, since even the "robust" NT OS seems to crash on me every few days.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
I remember an officemate of mine who took apart and rebuilt his chair so that it reclined a little bit, the way he liked it.(OTOH...he works at M$ now...hmmm...)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Something else to keep in mind is that with computers, employers are able to track EVERYTHING a little better. And they do...
An employee at Powell's Books, a monstrous used book store observed to me once that they were changing the kind of people they were hiring from book people to computer people. These new types may be able to find a book, but they won't recognize many of the more obscure greats.
With NT it is possible to manage an employee's access privileges right down to whether they print landscape or portrait orientation. Employees know it, that they are being monitored. How does this affect morale? How many more managers become necessary to make observations, and to manage employees.
These computers also allow for more meetings and for more memos and for more tiers for efficiency to be stripped away. I had a TeX job with more managers than production...and so many meetings very little got done. I think that all of the production has been laid of or upgraded to management now.
So there may be a need for redefinition of productivity, and perhaps a new look at the Perotesque managerial facism which is becoming so popular in the corporate world.
Rick Rezinas
-- An image is worth about 2.5E4 characters.
So think what you will about the Solow's paradox (I don't know what to think, frankly, because I don't know anything about the methodology with which the productivity data is gathered) but don't take this guy's opinion seriously.
That's why management just doesn't get "the Unix thing". There's no PowerPoint for Unix. How can they possibly do anything?
The subtle point here (below the radar of your average troll)... is that while they definately have uses, some "office tools" tend to cause a lot of bogus work. We find ourselves able to push more data around - but a lot of that data really has little to do with actual productivity.
ok, 1 crash/day isn't that far off. but lets look at in closer. only 1 in 3 crashes ussualy causes any significant data loss. and only 1 in 20 crashes causes the operating system to piss all over itself. lets say that it takes someone 15 minutes just to reboot, and 2 hours to recover a lost document, or correct a corrupted one. and lets say it takes on average 45 minutes for a tech to repair the 1 in 20 crashes that causes OS damage. now lets say that 1 in 5 of those requires an OS re-install, which takes 4 hours to get the OS back on, network configured, and apps back on. lets say you are managing a 500 computer network.
so you have 500 crashes/day totle. 2/3 of those require just a re-boot = 333 crashes = 83.25 Hours
and 19 out of 20 requires 2 hours of work by the user. well with 166 crashes left, this comes to 158 * 2 = 316 hours.
now you have 9 crashes/day that require a tech to do some work. 4/5 of those require just 45 minutes work so 2 crashes*45=1.5 hours
ok, and 1 of those crashes requires an OS re-install that is 4 hours of a techs time.also note that when the tech is fixing the computer, the worker isn't working, so count these times also.
ok, so
83.25 + 316 + 1.5 + 4 = 404.75 hours of clerical time lost * say $12/hr=$4857/day
add to this 5.5 hours of tech time/day * say $18/hr = $100/day.
now lets see how many days/year are working days.
52 weeks * 5 = 260 days * 4957 = 1.3 Million/year.
now for just 500 computers, that is significant. That dosent count for other IS costs such as new servers etc.....
maybe you went back to the data centre because no one wanted to work for you.
"If your software isn't working right, _you're_ doing something wrong", which is often just a fraud. Guys who have successfully run Pr1mos, AS/400, VMS, Novell Netware, etc., etc., don't suddenly become incompetent when faced with a supposedly admin-friendly box doing more than 1 job.
That's what happened at my last job - heavily loaded NT servers that wouldn't stay up, even after MS themselves came in to fix it.
The problem with NT seems to be a combination of specific memory leaks, which a particular installation may or may not activate, and an increased vulnerability to conflicts between applications, because of (1)the registry, (2) the lack of separate paths for libraries and executables, (3) the disorganized approach to different versions of the same dynamic library, and (4) possibly other things. But, Steve Ballmer _has_ been re-focusing on product quality, we can hope that future versions of NT will be more polished.
the point here: use whichever OS makes you the most productive. ...
i can't help it if sexy women think the mac OS makes me more desirable
Mindy: "Well...desserts aren't always right." Homer: "But they're so sweet!"
"You need to look at what else you're running. A properly set up box (i have lots of them) doesn't behave that way. 98 is trash, i won't argue there, but NT is stable when set up correctly."
Linux doesn't crash when set up any way that it runs. This is the point that you Microsofties miss. Microsoft software is UNPREDICTABLE! Printers disappear, icons change colors, IE takes a dive when the machine is JUST SITTING THERE...What the f*ck??????????? Exchange disassociates mailboxes from NT accounts FOR NO REASON (don't touch our server ever, and these things constantly crop up), SQL server logins get "access denied"...try again 1 second later, your in..WTF???. How about VPN? Encryption? The VPN encryption in NT Server is completely circumventable. I have learned that MS takes continuous effort to maintain, and is hackable as hell. Our Linux box has been running flawlessly for 168 days since upgrading, and it does more work anyways. Micro$oft...What a bunch of a**holes.
Chris
In a few current management training classes, they've pointed out that workers in the US learn the same thing that a lot of kids learn.
If I do a lot of work or try new things, I'll probably screw something up. If I do, then my boss will jump down my throat. So, I shouldn't try anything [including extra work].
Apparently, this style is passed via upbringing. Usually, parents don't pay attention to a kid unless he's screwed the pooch. So, you see, the general feel of workplace America (according to this line of reason) is the art of not being seen.
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
as for "productivity", its a largely bogus concept anyway. the purpose of the capitalist enterprise is to provide a comfortable life for the various people who run it, just as in any other bureaucratic institution.
Economists use some very simplistic measures of productivity. For them nothing has value unless it can be measured, and the only measure of value is the selling price.
If I look at productivity of toilet paper production over the years (I haven't done this, so this might not be a good example) I might find that toilet paper prices (taking inflation into account) have been pretty stable and it takes just as many inputs to produce a roll of toilet paper now as in 1920. An economist might conclude that toilet paper technology has been stagnant and there has been no improvement in productivity.
If I go into an actual toilet paper factory I'd probably find that the workers have better conditions and are generally healthier today (due to less exposure to toxic chemicals). If I use the toilet paper I might find that it's much softer and stronger than it was in 1920. None if this is captured in the economic analysis.
The fact is that productivity has increased incredibly, but in this competitive marketplace we keep trying to improve the product instead of making it cheaper or giving ourselves the benefit of a more relaxed lifestyle. This is one of the problems with our competitive economy. It certainly leads to rapid and exciting advancement, but it doesn't let us enjoy the benefits.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I would consider having to reboot because of a configuration change on a box that is not in the core OS (kernel) to be a "crash."
Well if a screen saver can cause a crash of the whole OS then that's not a stable OS IMHO. If it just crashed your GUI, that I could see....
Judging by how slow American car manufacturers have been to adopt the level of automation found in Japanese plants, I would say we have a whole lot of trade unions here in the US.
We sent men to the moon with tons and tons of vacuum-tube and discrete-transistor analog technology. And quite a heap of mainframe computer technology as well.
We couldn't have done it without the computer. But we did it without what 80% of the people at random would think you meant by the word 'computer' today.
Maybe they had the floppy-disk version.
heh
"I'm in the same boat. If somebody can't get a PC running NT to stay up indefinately, they should be fired. Period. NT: Install, apply latest service pack, walk away. Any questions?"
Bullshit. I've had to reinstall NT 7 times on our server because it has a lot of applications on it, and if you install them in the wrong order. Blam! BSOD. Stuff like SQL Server 6.5 and Exchange...BackOrifice. Hard to believe they sell it all together, but its a ridiculous song and dance to get it all to work. How could the order of installation really be considered something a "competent" admin would know? Answer me this: Why does out ISS WWW service stop for no apparent reason every few days, with no event log entries or IIS log entries. Just stops. I'm sure I screwed up the installation cuz I'm incompetent, right...install NT4 option pack, reinstall SP4. Just like it says in the "mistake base".
Chris
Ahhh... But if I were CTO in a public company, I have to worry about the quarter. Shouldn't I take the short term view, as long as it doesn't kill the company, and just deal with the lower productivity?
If I switch over to your system, there will be a learning curve, and I'll have to worry about actually keeping my employees from leaving after 6 months. That goes against the way we do business in Amayrica, sayr!!
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
I've been using 95 since it came out, but let take the example of my current job. I have a Dell P2-450 with 64MB RAM. I have been using it for 4 months now. I use it all day every day. I always have Lotus Notes, telnets, IE, Vantive (crappy client/server system), Sonique, and MSN Messenger running. I also heavily use Office 97. How many times has my machine crashed since I got here (with the exception of a buggy Winamp I tried)? ZERO. Not one crash, hang, anything. I have not been so lucky at previous jobs, but I have never come close a daily crash. When someone complains about thier windows box crashing its usually because they have games and 3d drivers and all sorts of non-productive stuff. I have a feeling that if I was to go monkey around with Linux I would have far more problems than the author here has with Windows.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
I agree there's a problem here, but it's your mission critial digital information :)
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
Applicatoin programs should not be able to crash a system, period. If you believe otherwise you are the one that is incompetent.
Indeed.
Has anyone noticed that this resembles the "damages" companies report after a cracker ("hacker" for you media-philes) attack?
I'm not a fan of NT in the workplace, but please! If you're going to abuse math, do it with some class. An editorial's ass should never be the source of statistical data.
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
Productivity absolutely has increased! The fallacy that Solow and Moody both accept is that if I can get my old job done in half the time, my boss will let me go home at noon every day. Bullshit! Clearly my boss will take that extra time and set me to work on features that are desireable but that previously couldn't be budgeted. I'll still spend the same number of hours working, but the resulting product will be spiffier than had I worked at my old pace.
:) hours a day" but "How does my definition of 'productive' differ from the definition of 30 years ago?"
The trouble with Solow's "Paradox" (I thought that word was reserved for logical impossibilities, not just quirky statistics) and with this column is that nobody is thinking outside the box. The obvious question to ask here is not "Why do I still work 8 (or 12 or 23
I'm sure we've all wished to ourselves at one time or another that sleep weren't necessary and that we could spend our nights working. Elysium dreams of endless freetime spring into our minds. But this is nonsense, because you know that if nobody had to sleep, our economy would gobble up the slack and the PHB's would have us all working 20 hours a day.
The obvious parallel is the electric light. I wonder whether people deluded themselves into thinking at the turn of the century that their bosses would still release them at dusk and that they could spend the rest of their day before bed on their own pursuits. Hah! A quick look around any server farm at 3am quickly illustrates the defectiveness of that reasoning.
Sure it takes the same number of work-hours to produce a 1999 car as it did a 1950 car. But look at the difference in complexity between the cars!
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
> Restart the computer.. even on good size HDs, the scandisk program will take about 5 minutes to get through.
I think the most amusing aspect of Scandisk is that Micro$oft has the balls to tell you that:
"To avoid seeing this message again, always shut down the computer properly using the Shut Down option in the Start Menu."
You know, for all the times I've seen that, I'm ready to state that I'd love to shut down the computer properly at least once in my life, but I can't quite seem to get the thing to let me. Must be a problem with the operating system...
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
I disagree. I'd say that most corporate workplaces use NT. Win 95/98 is NOT for the workplace and MS says this explicitly.
Microsoft may say that 95/98 is not for the workplace, but it's there, and that's a good thing. Try imagining teaching people NT over 95 or 98. No, real people.
While people often try to compute monetary costs of lost productivity, I think it's much more important in the case of Windows to consider the human cost.
I haven't updated http://www.aracnet.com/~bart/billg.html in years, but the concept hasn't changed. Multiply wasted time by enough people, and you're right up there with the highway death toll or a medium sized war.
All Solow's Paradox proves is that the real bottleneck in labor is the human mind, not rote labor. Before there were calculators, people had to add 12 + 132 in their heads before they came up with 144. Now people need to find the buttons 1, 2, 3, + and = on a calculator. The calculator is doing the routine labor, but the amount of time it takes to get the answer is the same.
In other words, people are spending less effort due to computers, but aren't more efficient. Effort relates to rote "assembly line" labor. Efficiency comes from the human mind, and computers haven't made any improvements on the mind last time I checked. Hence productivity remains constant, even before the BSOD existed.
-Ted
Don't forget, many people are also using Win9x because NT4 doesn't support their hardware.
--bdj
This trend started well before the PC. If you really want to trace back the whistles and bells, I'd say the non-improvement in office productivity started with the photocopier.
How many people today can tell you what "cc:" means in e-mail? Answer: Carbon Copy. Before photocopiers, you had to stack paper with sheets of carbon paper between them, and run that through your typewriter. At best, a secretary could create 3 simultaneous copies at a time (1 original + 2 carbons) before the quality got really bad.
When photocopiers first came out in the 1960's (I was just a kid then, honest), I can remember hearing ads on the radio like, "Mrs. Smith, I have a meeting in an hour. Please make 20 copies of this letter." "But Mr. Jones, that will take the rest of the day!" "Not any more, Mrs. Smith. We now have a Xerox blah blah...."
Sure, making the actual copies is faster. But now, instead of only the essential people receiving correspondence, EVERYONE can be copied, and sucked into meetings. More paperwork crap (or e-mail, same thing) to wade through.
As someone else pointed out, the secretaries have all but disappeared, leaving documents to be created by higher paid, but otherwise mostly computer illiterate users. The users aren't really to blame. A salesman used to have professional clerial staff (like typing pools) to back him up. Now that salesman has a PC and no training on how to use it effectively.
Is it suprising this has resulted in a zero-sum gain?
The number one reason is that work is evil and
a four letter word.
C'est pas mal, ca... :)
Moody = Ridiculous Outfits(Management_School(Katz));
First of all, of course productivity has gone up since the advent of the computer; it's MANAGEMENT, SALESMANSHIP and BUSINESS ACUMEN that determine profitability, among other things, none of which have anything to do with computers, what OS one uses, etc.
If my computer spits out twice as many data widgets as it did yesterday, I am being mas productive. If my computer is twice as fast as it was yesterday, it stands to reason that I can meet that expectation of my productivity.
That's not to mention that the tasks are more complicated: There's not even a comparison between what I'm doing digitally now and what I was doing with a computer even 5 years ago.
Going back even further, I made $45 bucks a week picking strawberries when I was 10, and it made me enough money for two pairs of kid pants. Now I can buy 2 pairs of fat man pants for that same money, and it only takes me 3 hours to earn it! So not only is my work since the dawn of the information age much more complex (and therefore, one might argue, more valuable), it's more efficient. I'm working smarter, not harder, remember?
I'm having doubts about this guy Moody. Maybe someone can explain how this guy is even remotely credible, cause it's not his takes, or the Afrika Bambaataa beanie that's doing it for me.
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
Why has productivity not increased with the increase in tools?
Easy, it has. In my line of work slide rules, pencil and paper flew humans to to moon. Now I sit in front of a 400MHz computer running (NT, ugh) gobs and gobs of models outputting thousands (millions?) of lines of more output in a week than any engineer in the Apollo era ever did in a career.
But what am I building? I'm building better and more sophisticated experiments. There's more power, less weight, less cost, more regulations, and I'm still getting it done. Why? Because I have better tools to make quicker decisions, create more data to make more complicated decisions, or read slashdot.
Let's be realistic, the tools we create are created to get the job done. What do you need to get the job done? Labor. There is still only so many hours in the day. But there's more work to do to continue to make improvements (cars, airplanes, buildings, bridges, roads, etc) over existing products. Otherwise nothing would get safer, cheaper, or more efficient.
I'm sure if we were still manufacturing gas guzzling cars without seatbelts, anti-lock brakes, passenger compartment safety cages, fancy sound system, shift on the fly four wheel drive, and traction sensing power, we'd be more efficient when measuring efficiency as stated in the article.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
With the exception of /. readers, I've found that most people use their computers (whether at work or at home) for nothing more than personal finance, word processing and e-mail/Net surfing. That's it. Their machine is idle 95% of the time, because a person's day is consumed by activities that are in no way related to a computer. Sure, the computer has made us productive in that 5% window (creating documents, communicating over the web), but we still need to write paper cheques, sign paper contracts, meet people face to face, drive to the supermarket, and drive to work. For all the hoopla of our "connected society", we're still very disconnected. Oh, and BTW, FIRST! SuperDuck ragnar@interlog.com
sorry for the language, but let's take a reality check.. a fair chunk of the work being done in business today wouldn't even be *possible* without computers.
case in point: trot down to your local office supply store and buy a pack of ledger paper. now take it to your accounting department and ask them to run the numbers for next quarter's budget on it.. no spreadsheets allowed. if you're lucky, they'll just laugh in your face.
the same is true for all those databases and custom front-end applications which allow people sitting at a phone to take orders. just *try* checking the availability of every item manually (and don't forget, you not only have to check the shelves, you also have to cross reference against the other pending orders which haven't been packed yet). let's see what happens to the concept of same-day shipping if we go back to the good old paper-and-pencil method.
next up: desktop publishing.. sure, The Computer Is Just A Glorified Typewriter.. one which prints in any font, any size, isn't locked to a character-mapped raster, can generate graphics on the fly, allows you to make incremental changes to a document without losing all your previous work in the process, and can print as many identical copies of that document as you want. go haul out your old Smith Corona and see how long it takes to knock out a dozen employment applications, or twenty copies of the yearly sales report (*with* graphs) for the upcoming board meeting.. and remember, close doesn't count: they all have to be *identical*. how many of us can truly say we're nostalgic for the days of carbon paper and white-out?
computers have allowed us to become blase' about the prospect of an individual doing, in a few minutes or hours, what used to take entire departments days or weeks (hyperbole? go add up all the day's transactions in a bank by hand). if anyone wants to measure the effect of computers on productivity, i want to see a test where they do *exactly* the same work without recourse to computers at all.
Really, I think the reasons are much simpler. Most people don't do more work than they need to, and for people in jobs with pre-computer-aided expectations it's easy to still produce the same amount and spend the rest of the times taking smoke breaks in the alley. And the second contributing factor is distraction, be it solitair or /. or writing endless little perl scripts to 'simplify' our jobs, we can spend a lot of time that isn't 'producing' whatever the product the indexes index.
But the next level of the argument, I would think, would be rethinking just what's measured in 'production', because, even if we make the same number of widgets as we did 20 years ago when we were handcarving widgets out of stone; the fact that we have an extra 3 hours a day for personal pursuits perhaps makes us more well-rounded widgeteers; increases personal and job satisfaction; and spawns creative construct.
Or maybe not.
actually, it's "c'est la vie". But I'm irredeemably pedantic. =)
Three good reasons why productivity hasn't increased much in the workplace since computers were introduced.
1. Games
2. Email
3. The world wide web
That's even _before_ you take into account crashy software (and hardware, since a lot of companies can't afford to upgrade all that often).
"Cake or death!" (E. Izzard)
--
"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
About 2 hours after writing this comment I was writing a report using Orifice word97 when it crashed on me and took my box down. After rebooting, I fired up word again, expecting it to automatically load the last autosave of the document I was working on. It usually does this after a crash. When it came up with a blank document, I went looking for the autosave file and found a nice FILE0002.CHK that looked strangely familiar. I ignored it and opened the original file since I had manually saved 5 minutes before the crash. If I hadn't just saved and didn't know to look at scandisk files, I would have been up the creek and lost a couple hours of work.
I should not have mocked the all knowing pundit Moody (Jesse Berst Jr.)
------- Mark
Agreed. Moody uses an assumed figure of: 1 crash a day per user, with each crash causing 2 hours of down time 'recovering the document'. I'd sure hate to work in IS for his company! I personally support almost 100 users, all of which depend quite heavily on their computers [mostly laptops], and there's no way I could handle that if they were down for 2 hours a day!
I don't deny that crashes [yeah, mostly caused by windoze] waste a lot of time, but some more realistic figures would have given the article a little more credit.
Ender
There are very few problems that cannot be solved through a suitable application of high explosives.
Nothing to see here
...even though I intensely dislike Windows and distrust Microsoft, I don't think it's fair to blame ALL productivity problems, or even most of them, on Windows. Windows is simply the single best example of software that doesn't let our computers do what we need them to do in order to be more productive.
For a highly detailed analysis of the real problems we need to overcome, drop by your local BOOKSTORE and pick up
The Trouble with Computers
by
Thomas K. Landauer
It's an insightful, well-argued, and thoroughly documented exploration of the productivity problems which proliferative computing has failed to deal with effectively. I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in computer applications or the software industry.
It's one of the best books I've ever read, and it's helped arm me with a healthy critical attitude towards computers and the miracles they are purported to bring us.
*Note* however, that it's still up in the air whether Microsoft's influence on the software industry has helped prevent the proper advancement of software design techniques which we need to overcome stagnant productivity. To see what I mean, read the book...
My $0.02
Chief Justice
machine 1: 1:04pm up 71 days, 20:31, 2 users,
machine 2: 1:04pm up 166 days, 23:58, 3 users,
machine 3: 1:04pm up 153 days, 19:57, 1 user,
This is just a sample subset of about 50 workstations. All run Linux, all running Staroffice, browsers ,email, several in house written programs. All have client access to a Oracle server. The linux servers have equally great uptimes:
1:05pm up 253 days, 19:57, 45 users,
The only reason it was booted to begin with was to install a newer kernel. These jewels serve http, ftp,samba file and print services as well as Oracle and mysql databases
Our company has spent tens of thousands of $$$ in support contracts with various companies to keep the Microsoft crap running. Even Microsoft themselves could not figure out a lot of our problems. Oh I guess we are too stupid to figure out how to make Windows stable. No. Our only stupidity was using Microsoft to begin with.
Our productivity has soared through the roof. Gone are the reboots, the lockups, the desktop freezes. Our people do not miss MS Office one bit. They simply take it for granted their Linux boxes will work when they launch that program.
Microsoft people and MS themselves can grasp for straws and continue to make excuses for this unreliable junk. Linux has not only saved us tens of thousands of $$$ in support costs, downtime and lost data, but it is a living proof that the Linux Desktop can survive in an office environment and represents a bottom line TCO much much cheaper than expensive, closed, bend you over the table, commercial software will ever dream of obtaining. It's quite amazing (but not very amusing) how the masses are so gullible and will believe in MS marketing hype. Anyone who attempts to tell you that the MS solutions are reliable and robust, beware of them as they are out to rip you off and suck your bank accounts dry from high support costs and down time.
During Linux's entire life cycle MS has yet to produce a reliable, robust Operating system. MS claims they will not release w2k until it is stable. Based on their current track record in this area, it is therefore doubtful they will even release it at all. And even if by some miracle from God it is stable, its too little too late. We will *never* go down that road again.
It isn't very different at all, I think you're confusing administration and end use. The UI isn't any different.
And we've traded the legions of secretaries for legions of network and PC professionals.
Not a good trade.
Wook
What????? Are you not a member of NTBugTraq? Do you not read about the 30 odd flaws with SP5? Have you not heard about the nice ODBC vulnerability thats getting demoed today? Try and watch SP5 and IE5 work peacefully together. How many times do you reboot your NT box a week? We have to kill our server about once a week and I have to shut down the box at my desk every other night to keep the thing from locking up. What are they running? NT4 and SP5.
---- sonoffreak
How about one where those systems (and others) coexist and run applications that use common, standardized document formats that eliminate any need for conversion?
Or even if everyone used Office and the formats remained proprietary, as long as they are the same on each platform? Operating systems don't create file formats, applications do.
Also, the article didn't say anything about monopoly issues or the importance of multiple platforms; it just states the need for a platform that works, which Windows ain't. He blames Microsoft, not for being a monopoly, but for their making stuff that doesn't work. Don't change the subject.
Something else that he doesn't mention: didn't I hear a few years back that Sun (not exactly unbiased, I realize) had banned the use of PowerPoint becuase they had determined that their managers were spending more time playing with the pretty pictures than working on the actual content of their presentations, which actually declined in quality as a result? Point being: all this "productivity" software doesn't necessarily let you do any more actual work, even if it works fine. Instead, it can distract you from the real work by getting you obsessed with cosmetics.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
It's not the computer, nor the OS on it that is causing productivity to fall in recent years; it is the people using the computers that are the cause.
About ten years ago I had the pleasure of working with the last of the "classically trained secretaries" that I ever met. She was the type of highly trained employee that did everything ONCE, no printing ten slightly different drafts of the same damned thing, just one. She KNEW what her boss wanted and how to create it in one go.
All the other secretaries (sp?) in that office were new to the profession (er, "job") and had learned their way arround computers before they learned thir actual jobs. In the same amount of time it took one of these people to do one document on a computer the secretary in my previous paragraph could get four done, on a computer or on a typewriter.
Of couse, she also got paid a lot more than the other, but she had been with that firm for 20+ years.
In all my other jobs involving office staff I have never seen professional office staff, just entry level people looking for better work while muddling through this job.
Productivity has gone down because business no longer looks at clerical support as a profession, and niether do those who enter the field. Women used to go to college to learn to be professional clerical staff. Now it's whomever knows how to type faster than 10 words a minute.
Add to this the fact that we expect one person to do on their computer what four to ten people used to by hand and we get a clearer idea of the problem.
That's my rant for the day.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
A witty anonymous coward. It's a freakin' Miracle!
It's a Unix system - I know this.
That message has been bugging me since I first saw it too.
Amen brother!
It's a Unix system - I know this.
True, true. I was just overcome with excitement from being first. Thats my first first you know.
---- sonoffreak
95% of people don't really know how to use a computer. Sure, they've learned the routine of what icons to click in order to send a fax...but few seem to know how 'navigate' the system efficiently, or create an uncluttered organization of their work files. I cringe watching most people using their computers...like folks who leave the keyboard repeatedly to select each field of a form with the mouse, when the "tab" key will do the same much more quickly.
I recently had the opportunity to watch a blind man use a computer. He has a screen reader that reads out, line by line, the entire screen. He used pine for his email. He types about 30-40 wpm. He can do calculations in spreadsheets in excel. He received a package from UPS while we were there.. he grabbed the box, and put it upside down on a scanner, and then scanned in the From/To and had the screen reader read it.
Watching him actually do these things is excruciatingly painful (imagine: press tab, wait for screenreader to read. Press tab again, wait for screenreader.. etc. Even things like alt+tabbing through programs took lots of time).
The amazing part is, he taught himself all this after becoming blind. Before he was blind he had never used a computer. I think "Hey way to go for productivity". If this had happened to him 15 years ago, he would not have been able to hold his job, communicate with people, etc.
You really SHOULD read the article. Here's the Cliff Notes anyways: Productivity = Input/Output.
Excluding IT fields, this hasn't changed much. Despite all the HUGE advances in technology, it has failed to increase profits.
So, yes, CAD may have revolutionized several fields. But has this new way of doing things translated into higher profitability at an aggregate level? Apparently not.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
OK, perhaps we're not more productive, I won't argue that. But we're a hell of a lot more efficient.
I can whip out the plastic and have damn near any product known to man delivered to my door tomorrow morning, just by punching numbers on my computer screen, and perhaps a short phone call.
Wouldn't be possible without computers.
nope :-)
---- sonoffreak
I'm curious about his assumptions.
;) I probably lose about 20 minutes.
;)
a) 1 million people using Windows on a given day.
b) 1 crash per day.
c) 2 hours lost per crash.
I don't think I actually lose 2 hours per crash -- but I save often and reboot often.
I don't have 1 crash per day -- I reboot before I use my Windows machine and use it minimally. I probably do about a day's worth of Windows work in 3 weeks so I am probably not typical. (I mostly use Solaris
However, I think 1 million users per day is low, offsetting the other issues.
Does anyone have any good data on this?
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I got a degree in management. In the days of that adventure, I took a class in administrative management taught by one of the department's senior secretaries (only a 2 credit course). The course took a hard look at how to actually order and use office equipment such as 10-key machines, copiers, dictaphones, etc. In short, it was taught by someone in the working trenches who knew what it really took to be "productive".
In my last stint with a major corporation, beginning in 1990, I was a support administrator responsible for a small departmental LAN with 35 workstations under NOVELL 3.12. At the time, the fileserver was a 286/10, 200MB HD with a 200MB mirror, 16MB RAM. Most of the workstations were PS-2 Model 50's & 60's running WIN 3.0 (and WORDPERFECT 5.1 under DOS sessions) although some of the engineers were given 386/16SX systems. The few times I had to run VREPAIR on the server were occasions of much fear and trembling since I did what I did courtesy of OJT and long reading of the manuals.
The productivity problems I saw had little to do with the OS and much more to do with inadequate funding for equipment and training. The people who had to get the work done were invariably the ones least likely to get the training and equipment to be "productive" Although the systems seldom crashed, they almost always ran low, slow, and awkward. We were essentially on our own to help each other and, fortunately, we were able to generally arrange workflows based on what we knew as long as the work got done.
If you want to see a lack of "productivity", watch a senior VP fiddle with 6 different revisions of a memo because he/she can't A) figure out what it is that needs to be said and, B) can't decide on which font best communicates that lack of decisiveness. When more people at the top realize that the work genrally gets done from the bottom up rather than the top down and fund the process that way, we might just see an increase in "productivity".
The problem just might be, as one corollary to Murphy's Law states, "Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself".
We have met the enemy and he is us - Pogo (Walt Kelly)
Years ago, when my father needed a part, he simply went to the dealership, told them the part number, they got one out of the bin, he paid, and then he left. Now, he goes to the same dealership, and tells them the part number. They punch it into a computer, and everyone waits while the computer searches the dealership's inventory, and finally prints out a page of information at the end of the counter. Then, whoever is working at the dealership reads the printout, goes to the bin, and finally gets the part.
It doesn't someone with a stopwatch to see that this is clearly an extra step. Now the dealership is happy because they can track their sales, and make all kinds of cutesy graphs, but my father now has to wait longer in line, and productivity hasn't gone up a bit.
Yes, Virginia, there really is a CowboyNeal.
My dad owns a hardware store, and that feature you mentioned is in his computer system already. It even understands what items sell seasonally (garden hoses, lawn mower blades, pipe insulation, what-have-you) and orders more during times of heavy sales.
you heard it here folks - when w2k arrives wait untill the other crash test dummys get it up to sp5 before deploying it in your mission critical business quality applications, unless you just want your business to donate unproductive time helping Microsoft® develop a product for their profit.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
crashes are only a tiny part of the picture. . .
.no one is going to read that on the screen. ..they're gonna print it. . .but they send it out as an attachment. . .so instead of paying some temp $6/hr to run that sucker off double-sided on the copier for far less than a penny a page you wind up with all your $30. .? employees each printing the thing out single-sided. . .lordy
[all you together people who edit TEXT and hardly ever print, realize that you ARE alone]
if people were using computers to prepare documents the same way they did on the selectric, well, yeah, there would be some gain. but almost no one does. instead each little memo is layed-out like a page from wired. any benefits of editing e-lectronically are wiped out by the extra formatting, etc.
also, there is the "'cause i can" syndrome. Have you ever seen a co-worker spend 4 hours getting a label for a folder printed out on the laser instead of using a marker?
then there is the Myth of Paperless. someone prepares a 20 page doc. .
factor in that for a lot (a lot!) of people doing anything on the computer--anything--is (in their mind) part of their resume. It gets them (in their mind) on the train and, yeah, lots of time goes down the drain. . .
if you happen to work in a really for true geek shop you might wonder, but if you have ever worked in the garden variety office, you know what I mean
(and this could be continued, example after example, for many, many pages)
Agreed. If all the win-users I have to support had 1 crash/day each, I'd never hear the end of it. Most go days between lockups; the lucky ones longer. Of course, most of them shut down their machines every night, too.
I had DOS users who went months without rebooting. Unfortunately none of the DOS apps we relied on will make the turn to 4-digit years or I'd still have them there.
"A gun is a tool, Marian. No better, no worse than any other tool. An axe, a shovel, or anything." Shane (1953)
All this shows is that it's crushing competition that brings in the productivity increases, not particular tricks that may or may not offer the chance of productivity, such as the use of computers.
Certainly Fred is off-base in blithly assuming it's brokenWindows penchant to crash which is at fault. He might be right, he just has no proof. Just guesses.
We like to run applications. It's no feat to have a computer sit there and do nothing or run one application constantly (Like a server), as long as that one app is good.
> "Let's assume that every information worker in the United States suffers a computer crash, on the average, of once per day - hardly an exaggeration. And let's say that each crash results in a minimum of two hours spent retrieving, repairing or replacing a lost document."
/real/ voodoo calculations going on in his article. By the way, I'll say it again, I don't see anyone pointing out that the inherent complexity of creating a given product (car, house) goes up as the complexity of our tools goes up. Think about it.
Am I the only person in the world who saves his work at regular intervals and has a computer that doesn't crash every day? There are some
"Old man yells at systemd"
It feels to me like Moody is simplifying the issues somewhat. Any geek worth his salt has read and taken to heart the classic fabled programming contest between Jesus and the devil. It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools, even if they are a little rusty.
In my opinion, if your employees are so slovenly in managing their mission critical digital information that it takes two hours to recover data from a program or OS crash, perhaps the operating system isn't your biggest problem.
--
Rob Carlson
I generally agree with Fred Moody, but this article smells like Scott McNealy's maniacal rants than something Fred would write. The idea that we have a paradox here, or dumber yet, that it's caused by Windows crashing "daily", is ludicrous.
I don't even care to defend Windows; suffice it to say that I use it more heavily than anyone that I know (Win98) and I've had it BSOD 1 time in the last 3 months, and I leave it on continually, rebooting once every few weeks.
The real "culprit" is simply the fact that pretty much every company out there is using similar technology, so nobody can get ahead. Workers do very different jobs nowadays.
Ever notice that no matter how many union jobs go "south of the border", we still are at full employment in this country. People do different, more complex things. Compare marketing now to 50 years ago. It's not uncommon to target mailing lists based on 10 or more criteria, and one person can do that- with the aid of a computer. Before computers, it couldn't have been done.
Are car factories *still* turning out the same number of cars/worker as they were 50 years ago? So what? Can somebody compare a car of 50 years ago to a modern car with a straight face? We have more design work going into a steering wheel now than the entirety of the Model T had.
The idea that we have a paradox here can only be born in the minds of someone who watched too much of the Jetson's when they were younger. We aren't progressing toward a society where computers and robots take care of all of our needs, leaving we humans with nothing better to do than sit around all day. Rather, technology allows each of us to do far more complex tasks than we are capable of by ourselves.
If someone wishes to simply measure the number of units coming out the back door of the factory, then, sure, probably about the same. But it good research would consider the quality and complexity of the product. And it would consider what the workers are doing now vs. what they were doing 50 years ago. To ignore those variables makes no sense.
Do you have ESP?
When reality and statistics collide, doesn't it make more sense to assume that something must be wrong with the statistics.
Gratuitous MS bashing aside, obviously people are more productive now than say 20 years ago. Its simply a hard thing to measure quantitatively.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I'm with you on this one.
One guy here says "If I do more, I will
be expected to do more".
How many of you know people that see a
computer as a status symbol? Like that
jerk down the hall that has the cool new
PIII 500 and not a clue. While you can make
a pile of junk do the work of 3 people.
There's a massive fallacy in this entire thread, which is the assumption that computers are simply the boxes which sit on people's desks while they play soliataire. One very simple test could demonstrate how flawed this assumption is - just turn off all computers for an hour and see how much productivity would plummet. Sure, it wouldn't have any effect on cubicle workers who might think it's another crash. But would GM's assembly line still work? Would banks still function? Would traffic lights or emergency services operate? Would airlines still fly their planes? This whole debate of whether computers are "productive" is so pathetic because people don't even realise this point. Computers are everywhere - from mainframes that keep your power supply running to embedded devices in your car to PCs that run lathes in machine shops. To think the workforce could be as productive without them is a brutally stupid idea. L.
-- Stock PC desktops are BORING. Just try and TELL ME that you've never customized *anything* at work to suit your style or make things easier.
Moron...
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
...there's a simple solution that's clear, clean, and wrong. Solow's paradox can't be answered that way. Consider: about half of offices use Unix in some way now. Has their productivity improved? Or another problem with the analysis: Would a person without a computer today be able to keep up with the office work? Or even do it? Probably not; they'd go the way of John Henry vs. the Steamshovel. With or without Windows. With or without Linux. The problem is this: advertising agency #1 hires 100 more people. Their competitors (#2) then hired 1000 more people. Firm #3 hires 10,000 more people. Which is the most efficient firm? Are these new people adding "productivity"? All you do with computers is generate more information. More papers, more thoughts, more documents, more programs. This in and of itself adds nothing to the assembly line, but the more you know, the more that in general you can focus the assembly line's production correctly. -Ben
His assumptions on document loss are ridiculous:
/., linuxtoday, etc take away a lot more from my working day than annoying windows crashes.
(1) Windows Crashes once per day.
Okay, I'll believe that one. Sometimes I get uptimes of over a week, but sometimes I crash once an hour. Depends on what I'm doing.
(2) Two hour recovery time per crash.
Total insanity. My C64 word processor had an auto-save feature. So has every office program worth its salt since. Anyone doing more interesting work on a computer (coding,design, etc) will definately be clueful enough save regularly if their program of choice doesn't do it automatically. And I find that if I do lose a piece of code to a crash or oops of some sort, the rewrite will be better thought out.
(3) $40 bucks per document lost.
That number seems okay, but not every crash will destroy documents.
I know that
------- Mark
<speculation type="rampant">
The main reason that most people aren't able to point to solid gains in productivity all across the board is because the nature of the work we do has changed. For example: in a retail environment - let's say, a clothing store with only one or two locations - people still want to do the same things they always have. Clients want to buy clothes, vendors want to take money and keep inventory. The things that have changed is that all the steps either faster or easier. I don't need to be carrying cash if I have plastic, and vendors can get near instantaneous reports on inventory and sales, rather than having to count by hand. This is all great, but it doesn't mean that they're actually going to be selling any more clothes.
There's a rule in economics called "The Agricultural Treadmill." Basically, it means that even though modern production techniques may improve so much that you can farm thousands of acres with only a couple of guys, it doesn't mean that people are magically going to get hungrier and want to buy all that food. I think the same thing applies here. There's a point of diminishing returns in how fast you can get information critical to your business, because you get information much faster than your business actually needs it.
The folks at Oracle, MS, Lotus - none of 'em will tell you this. Who loves ya? ;) </speculation>
certain people think they're entitled to
'customize' their PC setup because its on
their desk.
Switch to *nix based OS, and immediately you'll
weed out the majority of clueless bored losers
that break their PC's.
Even if they can still customise it's still far
safer than Windows. As well as being trivial to
automatically return to the default.
Interesting conclusion, although I don't agree with him. M$-bashing is certainly en vogue these days, and my own experience in desktop support leads me to believe that the lack of productivity comes mostly from 1) inadequate training and 2) too many "goodies" on the PC to screw around with. Plus, I honestly don't think that it's accurate to state that every Windows user experiences one crash per day. Win9x, sure, but NT is far more reliable (relatively speaking). (Now don't flame me just 'cuz I said NT isn't 100% sucky.) There are a lot of factors that enter into low productivity, like job satisfaction etc. Okay, we're all tired of Windows, but I'm not going to blame the earthquake in Turkey on Bill Gates. This guy's just jumping on the back of the DOJ bandwagon.
I think another piece of the puzzle is that it is now much easier to take on mammoth projects that would have been so complex w/out a computer that they wouldn't have been be dreamed of before. And while I am sure that many are succesful, many are NOT.
So while a company may have one project that turns into a huge money maker, they may have another that sucks those profits away.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Okay, pardon me if I'm being hopelessly naive (and I mean that...no sarcasm...), but could it be that the reason productivity isn't increasing is that there's a finite amount of 'producing' which needs to be done? A person who can do in 2 hours what took em[1] 8 hours b.c.[2] won't be more 'productive' if e doesn't need to do any extra work in the 6 hours of free time e now has...e'll probably spend the extra time reading /., playing Quake, etc. Right?
[1]: Spivak is fun! [2]: Before Computers. but you knew that.
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
as long as they don't interfere with the business at hand, they are really cool to have around.
Productivity is stagnant (sp?)... or so they say. Perhaps producitivity is up! And they just don't realize it. Reasonably a person will only do a certain amount of work per day that involves thinking. Not to mention, if they run out of things to do...
In many euro countries the standard work week is 30 hours. Perhaps their bosses have recognized that paying them for an additional 10 hours worth of surf time isn't going to increase productivity. I know that's what I do when I've run out of work or I just don't feel like concentrating any longer!
They say that in the IT industry there's a 40% increase. Sure there is! We have TONS of work to do all the time! We could work endless hours on creating a little darling of code! Pay attention here... the reason why we have a 40% increase is because we have 40% more work to do!!!!
Teach a man to dish and he will gossip for life.
Some have theorized that a tremendous amount of time is wasted by people futzing around, playing with the PC on their desk. Adding a new screensaver, changing the desktop in various ways, sending email to friends describing your cool new screensaver, and the new desktop setup you are using. All this eats up productivity time. I don't buy for a minute the gloatful 'theory' being bandied about here that it's because the machine crashes. None of the systems we use at my work are crash prone enough to be acutally affecting productivity to the degree implied in the article.
Perhaps a more locked-down Unix-type environment would improve productivity. Give people a desktop machine with a window manager locked into place, with a limited number of things to tweak. Make it impossible for them to write anywhere outside their home directory. Assign them an operating environment where they can't drag in games from home, except in glaringly obvious places like ~/bin.
Yep, that would eliminate quite a bit of fooling around. It would also make a lot of people hate working in a stiff unchangable Unix environment. (Of course, it's not fair to say it would have to be a Unix environment. A Windows NT desktop user with no administrator privledges can be locked down pretty tight as well.) Of course they would only hate it until they came to recognise that they were getting more done. The incurable tweaks and games players would quit. (yet another improvement in overall productivity!)
Oh yeah, and it would make all the sysadmins who read and participate on Slashdot into a elite. Cool, man!
I've always thought that any new technology first
gets applied to a problem in the same way that the
old tech is... and then gets applied in a new way
that is much better.(or so we think)
A good example I always remember is electricity in
drying clothes... first it was used to power
a device that squeezed water out (as opposed to someone having to turn the crank)... later on someone made the dryer....
So far most people use computers as a glorified typewriter.
Computers are probably much better suited to assigning jobs to people (at least in the sectors where it is easier to quantify what a person can do in X amount of times) or in automating various tasks...
A good example in using computing that I could think of is if I had a largish retail store I could have a computer 'guesstimate' sales and preemptively order product to ensure there is something to sell and to minimize excess inventory.
I guess my point is that we need to figure out how best to use computers and then the productivity gains will come.
To keep my opinion simple, this is just nonsense, and the author is either just silly or purposedly trying to get notoriety by misleading people.
It's amusing to see the perverse way in which the author uses the Fermi method (Enrico Fermis method to calculate very fast a quantity by guessing the initial values required to do the calculation).
This is the sentence that makes strikes me more:
"And every time a computer freezes up in the workplace, at least one document is lost or damaged."
Come on! I agree that Windows crashes a lot. On the other hand Linux has never crashed on me, although twice the system performance degraded so much that I had to reset my PC, but saying that everytime Windows crashes I lost some file is plain nonsense or a lie!
Many people will not produce more than a document a day. It depends on their work of course, but this is common. It what the author says were true there would be more documents lost than documents created! It is impossible that people could work in that condition, and Microsoft would not be in the position it is now.
The situation is bad, but it is not that bad.
Cheers,
Angel
I would agree that there are certain tasks that have not been made more efficient (or have been made less efficient) by computers. But that fact is more than balanced by the following factors:
- Previously impossible tasks are now possible (CAD, simulations, etc)
- Some tasks no longer require a human at all (ATMs and automatic processing of all sorts)
- Computers allow the creation of previously unavailable modes of human behavior that, in some cases, can be more efficient (cell phones, Internet usage, etc)
The list goes on. My point is that, since the economy is doing better, per capita, than ever before, it must be the case that each worker in the workforce must be more efficient than ever before. Where else but computerization to give the credit?---
Put Hemos through English 101!
"An armed society is a polite society" -- Robert Heinlein
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
One guy here says "If I do more, I will be expected to do more".
this seems to be very true. for most work, ( that is that work that a ape could be trained to do.) having had jobs like this i would say that the only means that productivity will, increase is to remove the human from the job. ie if a machine can do the work why isn't it doing it? ( yes, yes i wouldn't what people to starve but that a diffrent rant)
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
The key phrase is "has not been transformed into profits". That is, we are not measuring productivity by actual production, but by how much money is produced.
In fairness to our friends in Redmond, I have to say that this really isn't there fault (although they don't help).
The bottom line is that the only value any commodity has is the amount of time and energy that a PERSON put's into it, directly or indirectly.
That is, the price of Gold (for example) should really be, and in the long term is, based on how much time and effort went into mining it and how much time and effort went into stealing the land from the indians and how much time and effort the indians would have to spend on lawyers (paid by the hour) to steal it back.
My point is simply this: increased productivity results in lower prices, which results in people having more junk, which results in higher production, which results in more productivity... That simple. So, as long as we measure productivity in terms of money, we are buying into a fallacy.
Witness the rise of "service" jobs which don't actually produce anything -- most notably lawyers.
I think I'm rambling now, but you get my point.
-- Slashdot sucks.
Yes! somehow the mac got lost in all the discussion. Stats indicate that it takes one
person to support 30 to 50 Windows computers.
That same person, as long as he's not MCSE certified, can support 150 macs. If you think
Linux is difficult to configure, try re-installing Windows. Unless you're too orgainized, in which case you need to get a life, you'll never pull all the proper drivers together.
That's where my personal productivity has gone-- from 75% Macs to 80% Windows: no more hacking--just maintaining Windows.
1) The ODBC vulernability doesn't affect you if you're current on MDAC components. MDAC 2.1 or 2.5 beta avoid this issue completely.
:)
2) "30 odd flaws"? Care to list them all? I'm running NT 4.0 SP5 on an IBM laptop of all things, and it has never crashed once. And it's even running Novell Client32. Stay current on patches and drivers (just as you would in any other NOS) and there isn't a problem.
3) A real administrator would fix machines that have to be rebooted weekly. The quality of a NOS is only as good as the administrator and the hardware.
4) I have a home-built PII 450 sitting on my desk that's been running NT 4.0 ever since I put it together almost a year ago. It's crashed twice. Both times, I was running Unreal (yes, Unreal) in a window. And for some reason, I suspect that Unreal is the culprit in that one
I'm not advocating. I'm simply setting you straight.
Slashdotters often lament the intelligence of NT administrators as a whole, and I really don't fault them. I've seen what most are capable of, and that isn't much. I like to put myself above them in terms of capability, as I've admin'd everything from WFWG 3.11 to MacOS to FreeBSD. My machines don't crash, and if they do, I fix them. Isn't that what being an Administrator is about? If you can't do that job effectively...then look into another profession.
-witz0r
I've seen NT administrators set NT servers to run openGL screen savers. Then they wonder why they peg out and eat it.
I handle about 1500 users here in our LAN. I get two requests a day to restore a file. Two.
-witz0r
Maybe productivity in the average auto manufacturer hasn't greatly increased. But productivity amongst software developers and network admins has *definitely* improved since computers came along :)
:) )
In all seriousness, I don't understand where these productivity figures come from. The fact is that there are huge numbers of people employed doing jobs that would not have been possible *at all* in the pre-computing age.
I currently look after a large database system used by a financial services company. It tracks investments made by fund managers. There's nothing there that in principle could not have been done before computerisation - but you'd need a much larger team to manage it all. That would cost more, and so reduce the return to investers. So, with computers, you can have fewer people each generating more profit. Isn't that the definition of productivity?
Then there's customer services. If you want to know how much your personal equity plan is worth, right now, you can phone our call center. They will type in your customer number, and tell you anything you want to know - with all the information updated in real time. In the "bad old days" you'd have to make the request in writing, and it would have been several days out of date by the time the answer got back to you. Surely that's more productive for you as a customer?
Trying to remember back to University... there was one of our classes where the (rather boring) lecturer tried to explain all this to us. As I recall, computerisations which just replace *parts* of existing business procedures don't necessarily have the expected impact because all they do is speed up one particular part of the job, which exposes how slow some other, previously unregarded, part is. So there's little or no overall improvement. He proposed that when an organisation automates its processes, it should be radical and be prepared to change the fundamental nature of those processes.
For example, imagine an office where purchase orders have for generations been typed up by a secretary and sent in the internal mail to a purchasing office somewhere else in the building.
At the simplest (and least effective, and most common) level of computerisation, the typewriter would be taken away and replaced with a PC and printer. The secretary now types the purchase order, prints them out, and sends them in the internal mail. She probably *feels* more productive - but she's not.
A better approach might be to rip out the printer and put in a network. Let her email the request to purchasing. Or better yet, use a workflow application like Notes or Groupwise to submit the request into a work queue at the purchasing department.
But what they should *really* do is ask, "what does the purchasing department actually *do*?". After all, the purchase is already decided and approved. Maybe they can do without the purchasing department altogether. Maybe, the secretary can enter the details into a computer, and kick off the whole purchasing process without any further intervention.
(Just an example off the top of my head - it might not actually be sensible
And of course (see, I didn't listen to my English teachers either) it doesn't really take much less time to word-process a 200 word memo than it does to type it. Indeed, it may take longer, since there's so much temptation to reword, prettify, and generally play around with the memo after writing it. 99% of the time (for an internal memo) this editting is worthless in terms of information.
Personally, I'd make it company policy to force all internal emails of less than 300 words to be plain text only - that'd soon improve productivity! (Not to mention saving disk space).
The article is about what people actually use - Windows 3.1, 95, maybe 98. The Economist article is a little more balanced. They conclude that the productivity gains are probably still in the pipeline. Two hours a day per person fixing crashes seems a little overstated to me, but what do I know, I'm not a windows user.
Mainly because my job (processing millions of records and gleaning useful information from them) would have been impossible 10 years ago w/o mulit-million dollar machines and 5 people to run 'em. There's a lot more going on here than crashing windows. Seven years bad luck indeed.
I agree with the "it's the 'Net" posts. It's just so easy to waste time now and look productive. Like right now, my boss is looking at me, seeing me typing and seeming very productive ("He must be working on that new database"), and yet, here's my post. Add in e-mail and the VAST amount of personal correspondence that takes place on it. The fact is we have become much more efficient, but it will never show on the bottom line b/c we know how to "beat" the system. Dang sentient entities messing with statistics again.
+&x
Don't computers primarily help information workers like managers and R&D departments? How much do they help assembly floor workers? Which contributes more directly to the amount of product out the door? Management and R&D are crucial to a company, but not directly related to the rate of products manufactured.
Consider a large assembly line. A lot of the machines are run by embedded processors. If one becomes faster it's impossible to speed up just those parts of the line using it. How often is it worth retooling the whole line to take advantage of improvements? Judging by how slow American car manufacturers have been to adopt the level of automation found in Japanese plants, not too often.
You can more easily implement improvements to the process locally, and I think computers are helping there, but not as much with the speed of production.
Jim
yeah CAD has revolutionized it's fields. It also makes it easier to design preety 3D things, but AutoCad 2000 ships for like 3 grand. Whereas a simple sheet of drafting paper and some basic drawing supplies (ruler, sliderule, compas) shipped for about 10 dollars. So even though cad is more efficent, it's hard to earn back that 3 thousand dollars from cad.
>>[1]: Spivak is fun! [2]: Before Computers. but you knew that.
;)
In a TeXie way or are you differentiating at all?
Sinan
Computes are too powerful and have too many options for the average user. I can only speculate the amount of time the pointy-haired boss types spend deciding if the Power Pointer chart looks better with or without the bold face then calling up the tech people when he/she can change it back. The continuing increase in number of "little buttons" along the top of microsoft products only serves to increase the learning curve before they understand. Heaven help the coder whose boss discovered macros.
Banfield
You have to run faster and faster to stay in one place. The tasks that are done in the office nowadays often had no equivalent 20 years ago. Things like fact checking over the web for writing about a subject as foreign to the offices of 1980 as a slide rule is to 1999. The waters are uncharted, and look to be that way for awhile.
The real reason productivity is not up is threefold:
1: Internet access AKA E-Mail
2: Solitare
3: BSOD
Thos are our best weapons, that and total blind obedience to the status quo.
Nobody expects a corporate inquisition
You say you want a revolution....
Yeah, I remember how long it took me to do Flash4 animations for customers before computers....
;) -
01101100 01101001 01101110 01110101 01111000 01110010 01110101 01101100 01100101 01110011
sent men to the moon? Built the Boing 737 or the stealth fighter? Even designed a relatively modern car ... without the aid of a computer?
The point here is that there are a lot of modern marvels that are made possible through the use of computers. They might not have increased the number of cars their making over at Ford, but those cars ain't Model T's either.
A memo used to mean a white sheet of paper with some black text. 'Formatting' meant some word were underlined and that the left hand column was aligned. When's the last time you saw one of those? A memo must now have multicolored text and at least 5 different typefaces in varying sizes interspersed through at least 3 colored graphics. The same piece of information is conveyed (the company picnic is Saturday at noon), but people are pleased so much more by the professional quality of the note.
If I were made God, or even just office manager, for a day, the first order of business would be to delete every font off of every computer except for one fixed size system font. Of course, then I would have to install a bigger pipe to the net to handle all the extra surfing from the idle secretaries.
Another point everyone misses. People a not trained as well. The call center for an insurance claims division often consist of a welfare mothers whose 2 years have run out and have been forced into work. They got 30 minutes of OJT on how to use both the computer system and phone. If they have to pay childcare, the mother is making less than the welfare and the corporation is looking for ways to cut back on their pay. Meanwhile the company is reporting record dividends, buyouts and execs with golden parachutes.
The point here is not to denigrate anyone, just to point out that computers are being used to replace proper training and education. So that you have a smarter machine with a dumber operator. It's a wash.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Let me also add that I've not crashed any OS, be it MS/DigitalUnix/Linux for at least 9 months, and I have been using all four (MS=98&NT) rather heavily for development and games and whatnot. So that crap about OSs crashing once a day is just that. Crap.
The article is talking about the desktop OS that most business users are running for "productivity apps" folks, and that's Windows 95 (some 98, but not much), not NT.
Productivity hasn't increased because the productivity tools, the Office apps, crash often, and tend to break easily. Install any application that uses ODBC and you risk breaking Access or other parts of Office. Crash one of the Office apps, and it may end requiring a re-install of the OS and huge stack of application CDs. If an Office app crashes and damages the user's document file, there's a good chance the user won't even know there's a problem with the file and will waste hours trying to load it. To make matters worse, Word will blindly load a broken file without any sanity checks, then bring the system down if the doc is badly broken (this is why I prefer Lotus Word Pro--at least it usually won't load a broken document).
Speaking from personal experience, moving from Windows to Linux has already saved me at least 30 days of downtime in the last year. I've had only two hard crashes, both while tweaking the IDE controller settings with hdparm, so those don't really count since I knew that what I was doing could crash the box. I've never had Linux crash, rendering itself unusable and requiring a re-install, while Windows 95 did this to me at least three times, and OS/2 at least once. I've never had Emacs/XEmacs crash and destroy a document, neither has WP 8.0 Linux crashed.
Windows 9x is nothing but a distraction. Any time wasted with crashes, broken documents, feature-bloated, overly complex software is dollars down the tubes. This is unacceptable, unless you don't value your time.
Microsoft should introduce two new certifications:
slashdot broke my sig
How does one measure office productivity anyway? On an asembly line it is easy to measure producitivity and cost: widgets produced per hour
and $ per widget. The two are not in anyway the same, as 'office work' tends to require much more flexibility and creativity and the end product is much more nebulous. I have the same questions regarding programmer prodctivity, or any creative (non-cookie cutter) endeavor.
If anyone knows of good measures for office productivity, please let me know...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
And self-serving bs
Productivity hasn't gone up? Well, just make all those folks salaried employees, including the secretaries (who are all now office managers, and administrative assistants), and then management can tell 'em, "whatever it takes", and they get to work 50, 60, and 70 hour weeks.
So, *how* productive are you, week after week, when you're exhausted? When management keeps changing the specs? When they demand meetings that require *everyone* there, where they go through each person, one after the other, trying to figure out where they are...while *all* the others do nothing (nap time!)? And that, of course, because they don't know what they're doing, or how to manage...or are caught in turf battles between the next level up of management, and *can't* manage.
All this, of course, is after everyone's been undersized (forget downsizing, that *ain't* what happened).
All you do on a computer (except fer us actual programmers & sysadmins, and other techies), is research data, and write about data. It *still* requires a human being to comprehend the data, make sense of the patterns, and decide how to respond to it. *Nothing* increases that speed, except experience, and training. Companies almost *never* want to pay for the experience they need (they'd often rather hire someone, often for less, with a piece of paper that says they know something, over someone who's been *doing* the work for years), and most often, training consists of, "here's your cube, and you can ask questions of so-and-so over there" (who's got their own work to do, and may have no training or ability to teach).
You really want some amount of productivity increase? Downsize the multiple layers of middle management, who know neither the business, nor how to effectively do the work (ever get specs from them, and not be able to talk to the actual people who *do* the work?), nor, often, have *any* power to make any decisions.
Then get rid of the upper management who were hired from another industry, and have no idea what the business is about, nor what's involved in keeping it going, and only care about "reducing costs, and increasing 'profitability' over the course of the next quarter...esp. since they'll leave in about three years, anyway, and go somewhere else, leaving a trail of gutted departments in their wake.
Oh, yes, and treat the people who actually *know* their stuff, and do it *right*, as though you want to keep them going for the long term, not as consumables (a certain well-known consulting company, which shall remain nameless, but whose initials start with A.A., who I've not worked for, but with its people, is famous for the latter).
And yes, I've experienced *all* of the above, in the nearly 19 years I've been programming, and most of the above happened in medium-to-large companies.
But, as the "There Oughta Be A Law" cartoon I saw 15 years ago said, "Problem with hardware? Throw $$ at it. Problem with the building? throw $$ at it. etc... Problem with people? Improve their morale".
mark
"The beating will continue until morale improves"
"The meetings will continue, until we find out why productivity has dropped"
This is a real boob. He needs to re-think economics and how the new economy works...
Let me tell you about about engineering. Engineering is a discipline that has boosted capabilities enormously. But it is not the productivity that the economists figure in. For example when my father studied mechanical engineering he studied the exact same courses as I did. The same functions, methods, etc. However, he used a slide rule and I used a modern scientific HP calculator. His exams were the same length and had the same number of questions.
The question that needs to be asked is if there is no difference in engineering education in a time span of 30 years what did the computer do?
The computer enhanced productivity in that I can tackle the same number of problems, but with greater complexity. In the times of my father he may have used a much coarser rounding. I with the help of the computer have the ability to pinpoint the number.
That is what the computer brought. It does not make me more productive. The computer gives me the ability to handle more complex problems and richer solutions. Is this turning more profit? Absolutely not.
Think about it. When my dad developed products the concept of a car warrenty was non-existant. Now with the computer there is five to eight year warrenty. Again no traditional "productivity" boost. But a dramatic quality boost, which to me is part of productivity
But I guess saying that Microsoft is responsible for this evil is so much easier...
What a boob...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
[bing!] Incoming email.
Hmmm. Lets see... I've got to attend a meeting about backup solutions. No problem. Attend meeting. Get roped into doing "evaluation" of PHB's favorite choice. Could be fun... though I don't know where this software package came from.
Do evaluation. Convert text notes to Word format (they'll freak if its not a .doc). Add spiffy formating. Looks nice. Email results.
[Bing!] Incoming email reply. Word document is nice. Well laid out and informative. Could I make a Powerpoint presentation out of it? Uhh... sure... I guess.
Fire up Powerpoint. Import text. Pick a dignified, somewhat technical, and way-less-tacky pre-formated style. Poke and prod text into a presentation. Yea. It's spiff. Email results.
Back to "admin stuff". Life is good.
[Bing!] Incoming email reply. Can I maybe remove some of the more technical stuff? How about some standard procedures on using the software? Here's a badly formated document from one of the other evaluators... can you include his work too?
More shuffling presentation. Damn slides. Move this. Kill that. Done. Email.
[Bing!] Incoming email. What now?! Oh. Some manager is giving a presentation including the backup software. Can I change my presentation to his amazingly-tacky format so it looks seamless? Oh... and less technical detail. (grumble). Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.... reformat... email results.
Consider killing email client.
While it may be "part of the job", I can't help but wonder what else I could be doing if tools like Powerpoint didn't exist.
...not with the article, but with the responses. Given a perfect chance for Microsoft-bashing, the majority of the replies have avoided the knee-jerk reactions and instead tried to evaluate the true situation. Now this is how I like to see Slashdot!
I use WinNT 4 every work day, and it is admittedly more stable and robust that Win95. But I still battle flaky behavior: apps that lock up for no apparent reason, memory leaks, system slowdowns. I have to reboot a couple of times a week.
I work in a business that uses NT for networking, and we have servers crashing, general service weirdness, yada-yada.
------ "Darn floor. Big bite." (Koko the gorilla's best attempt at explaining the experience of an earthquake.)
are making cooler stuff and making it quicker.
:)
I would almost tend to think that productivity will never go up in a competitive environment. Everyone is always going to work hard to stay alive, and everyone will make things of a certain quality/avancedness such that they only produce enough of it to serve the market. something like that, I'm pulling this out of my ass and doing a bad job of explaining, but I swear this all makes sense in my head
-I go to Rice, so figure out my email address
You're on the right track, but the main thing I take issue with is
"Of course they would only hate it until they came to recognise that they were getting more done. The incurable tweaks and games players would quit. (yet another improvement in overall productivity!) "
that would be assuming that people enjoy being productive.
While that may true for some, I sincerely doubt ti's true for the majority.
The main (99%) reason people go to work is that they need the money. Sure it helps if you have an interesting job and enjoy being productive, but basically work for most people is a drag and they couldn't care less how productive they are as long as they don't get sacked.
Tools which genuinely enhance productivity are generally used to let people work less hard rather than to achieve more.
The happier people are at work, the less they mind working, so preventing them from pissing time away by playing with their
environment will just piss them off. Of course having good tools does make people happier so it
can have a benefit aside from the obvious.
Productivity is mostly a social thing, MS software might make people less productive
but I reckon that is more to do with increasing level of frustration
making people think "are fuck it, why bother" rather
than the obvious effect of lost work.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Alright, this "its the net" stuff is bogus. Most companies haven't had net access for more than three years. Really progressive companies may have had computers with web browsers and net access since 1995, but Solow's work is based on data that goes back at least to the seventies, if not earlier. I remember this being a topic of debate on public television in 1990 when there was no Web. In short, The Web is still new, the Solow paradox is much older.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
Good point. I've seen way too many six-figure executives fritzing away the afternoon creating Powerpoint presentations on their $5000 laptops instead of handing them off to someone trained to do great looking graphics.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Moody left out poorly designed and executed applications (I fight with MSWord on an almost daily basis), and the glut of information--which requires time to sort and process, hence cutting productivity.
This is not to mention crummy management, crummy employees, and office politics. The OS may be a factor, but it isn't the only one.
------ "Darn floor. Big bite." (Koko the gorilla's best attempt at explaining the experience of an earthquake.)
Well, if you're happy with servers that can't stay up longer than 3 months then you have what you want. Do you have 30 servers yet, so you and the users get to deal with a crash every three days?
I know a guy that has 4 NT4SP5 servers
that go for around 3 months before a reboot
and he's incompetent. He just buys recommended
HP's with NT installed.
1 box is file/printserver,
1 exchange, 1 webserver (intranet)
1 app server that has 6 users.
This is for total ~60 users.
another 15 or so to get it back up again, after the 30 it takes to run it go off and play on their Linux/Mac/BeOS/etc. boxes and wait for the inevitable to happen.
muahaha!
Insert mind here.
Take the average Windoze user with Office installed. User is typing a 50 page report, and Windoze crashes. Drat.
Restart the computer.. even on good size HDs, the scandisk program will take about 5 minutes to get through.
Open Word. Assuming no options have been changed from the default settings, there should be a version that is no more than 10 minutes old sitting on the computer. Load up and make changes. 20 minutes max to get back to the point where it was before.
Agreed, there are people and programs that don't save often, but that's their own fault. When you work with ANY computer system, you should know this as a hard and fast rule.
I also wonder about his 1 crash/day/person. My winbox at home has yet to crash from the OS in the last month. (I've had to do restarts because Half-Life didn't work right but...). I'm in charge of 2 windows boxes at work that have been running for about a month without a need to restart. I think that a properly tuned/setup Winbox is rather unfallible to crashes... not that the stability of Linux isn't tons better than this, but it's a lot more than Moody makes out.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
All we would do would be futzing around with configuration files and recompiling kernels to install the latest patches.
That's why you have one or two sysadmin guys on hand to do that stuff for them. In a corporate environment, the users generally don't and shouldn't have root on their desktop machines, and the users shouldn't have t be responsible for configuring and maintaining their machines.
---
DNA just wants to be free...
I support 50 users, all running 95 on Toshiba 233mhz laptops. I get calls about 95 crashing/freeing about three times a week.
:-)
:-)
Mind, these users use Oulook 98, Excel & Access 97, and Argus, none of which are exactly sparing in memory use. Given that their average Excel doc is 3-8 megs...
I wonder if all these pundits out there would rather be living in a corporate world where OS/2, OS 8 and 95/NT share the market equally and we'd waste hours every day CONVERTING from docs from one system to another?
-Markvs
...MCSE, SCO & Jack Daniels certified...
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
Hope most realize this is humor (or overstatement). Sure windows systems can and do crash. But on the desktop side, I don't see windows crash more than 2 or 3 times a year.
The collumn claims daily on average and 2 hours to recover on average. never seen that - don't for a minute believe anyone would tolerate MS siftware if that was really their experience.
Memory leaks don't equate to crashes. Competent administrators are notified when resource use reaches critical levels and problems are solved before they are unrecoverable.
Worker Productivity is a myth for a large part.
:), etc... The man power required for you to get a tube of toothpaste from the convenience store is mind blowing.
(at least I belive)
There are only a few workers that can be productive, those that contribute directly to the production of goods or services provided by a company. In other words, The worker who presses the button to make the molded rubber guard for your office furniture actually contributes something to production. The stock analist(?), working for the same company, who requires three underlings to fetch information and put them neatly into a bar graph or pie chart, so that he may nod "yes" or "no" only costs the company money...He produces nothing for the company. Lets add, legal counselors, people to answer customer service, technical support, and even the guy who arranges which company you ship with (not to be confused with the people in shipping who earn $8 an hour). Those people are "overhead".
However, in today's society people demand they talk to a person when they call the company, products must be shipped from the warehouse, decisions need to be made as to whether loans need to be applied for or not, and perhaps most distressingly - absolutely every person and thing must be checked to make sure that it is conforming to strictly enforced laws - workers comp, trade, copywright, pattent, anti-trust
What company's hope (and this is stolen from an old employer's mission statement) is that Cost is less than Price, which is less than Demand. (CPD)...or something like that...Goods and services are produced only if profitable. Decisions by management are made to produce something- only if it is profitable. Each worker may be more (or less) productive based on their job, but that is quelched when the scope of production is grown.
And for those of you who think that you could rule out some of what you view as "pork" - think again...marketing people hire web developers, sales associates require MIS staff, and secretaries still exist for VPs because VPs don't have a way of keeping track of everything they have to do (and I now believe they deserve them), and basically people want more...
But here is once change that should be made: Monochrome monitors for everyone.*
*with exception to marketing, graphic artists, cad developers, architects, etc...
There's my $0.02 worth...
You say you want a revolution?
Here's what's happening:
1. Lack of proper market controls (free, mandated, or otherwise), have led to a glut of goods.
2. In attempts to convert the stockpiles to sales, price wars have broken out.
3. Drastically reduced prices have cause downward-spiralling deflation.
Now, whether you believe in the free market or not, something is happening in the US that is not happening in China: our productivity levels are such as to promote low unemployment, high standards of living, low inflation, a relatively stable investment arena, etc.
This, of course, simplifies it too much. Productivity can be both a cause and an effect of other market forces.
One of the causes of China's deflation is a distrust of the economic situation, leading to low spending and high saving rates. The Chinese are hoarding their money, while Americans spend freely, even into debt.
The American productivity level may be so high that it can only be regulated by the hypers-spending of our consumerist society.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
I am actually running Windows 2000 on an IBM Thinkpad 600E, and I have never had a problem. I have run NT4 since it came out, and have had uptimes of nearly a year... on my home system! My boxes at work that I use for programming and web dev I've had up for 6 months at a time. My laptop has even run for almost a month without rebooting.. just putting it into power save mode(w2k supports this.) I think the problem with Linux people is they are unreasonable, or ignorant. If you want a nice Unix, use Solaris.
GeekMaster
Not "games", but "game". A game. Solitaire.
(Yes', I've known office clerks who have spent many hours playing Solitaire.)
Uh huh. Do you actually know about oh... Service Packs? How about the reapplying them after major system changes? :-)
-Markvs
My NT server (NT 4, SP4) running IIS 4.0 has been running for 228 days... and it's only a P200 w/ 128 megs!
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
From my experience, MacOS is even less stable than Windows, less configurable, and generally less useful.
If the proposition that OS stability is a factor in worker productivity is true, then MacOS has gotta be right up there with Windows.
I personally find CLI makes me more productive on the whole.
Luckily, Linux runs on the Mac now...
To further amplify, it's pronounced "ce la vie", but it's spelled "c'est la vie".
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
I quote from Hemos' posting "Of course, that doesn't explain why productivity wasn't rising pre-Windows, but c'est la vie."
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)