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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.
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? 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?
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
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.
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?
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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.
Solow is to "paradox" as Alanis is to "irony"?
<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>
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
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?
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.
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