Jim:
"calling software sales cap equipmt and doubling that
double counting PC sales because they run faster is nonsense
it does help productivity some, but with most people I know, it usually means more time staring at the screen wondering what the next step should be
instead of waiting for PC's to complete tasks"
I would argue that in a lot of cases new computers result in negative productivity. I run a law office. We used to use Dos, Wordstar, timeslips for dos and a database called alpha four and a program called software carousel to move between them. We also used a lantastic network. This worked fine. However, I had to stop using most of the programs because they became obsolete when newer, faster, more feature intense features were added. The result is that I now have to have a tech person to help with the network, we have had to learn several new programs and buy a lot of new equipment. I am no more efficient than I was then. Yes, there have been a few incremental features that are useful that I now have, but we were able to do all of our basic work quite well under the old system, with less crashes, and other annoyances.
Bottom line, we were forced to spend money on equipment and programs and to utilize outside help, at great expense, to get what is at best an incremental improvement and which I would argue in some ways a system which is less efficient.
While this is great for the computer companies and the software companies, I doubt that productivity has been much increased, at least not in our situation.
Little joe |
