re: "``Never before in history has productivity surged so late in an economic cycle,'' says Sherry Cooper, global economic strategist for Harris Bank. ``While some of the rise might be cyclical, the structural improvement is clearly sizable, thanks to the technology boom.'' "
A real-life example-- Until about 2 years ago, I was using a text editor to change web pages in my primary web site. By that time, the site had grown to about 150 pages (I believe it now is at 400 or so). Whenever I added a new section or a page that I wanted to include in the navigation bar, I had to open each html file and do a search and replace, then save the file and move on to the next one. This took about 30 seconds per page, or roughly 1 hour and 15 minutes for the entire site.
Two years ago, I realized that my staying with Windows 3.1 was hampering my productivity. All the new applications were being written for Windows 95/98. I bought a new Dell with Windows 98, and promptly ordered a copy of Homesite. With Homesite, I can do a global search and replace -- thereby changing all the pages in a single directory (and sometimes in multiple directories, depending upon their relationship to the main directory) in about 5 seconds. It takes a few minutes to plan what changes to make in what directories, but the total time required to change all my pages is now about 10 minutes. Had I not done this, with the growth of the site it would now take about 3 hours and 20 minutes to make the changes using the old method. In other words, I get the same task accomplished in 5% of the time.
INTCfan |
