[Image][Image][Image] GO Kids | GO Family | GO Money | GO Sports |[Infoseek Search] [GO Network] GO Home ABCNEWS [Image][Image] [Image] [GO Network] ABOUT GO NETWORK | SIGN IN | FREE E-MAIL WEB [Image] [Image] [The Sharper Image Visa credit card!] [Image] The Productivity Puzzle [Image] [Image] HOME Commentary [Image] [Image] NEWS SUMMARY It doesn't take a Nobel [Image] laureate to figure out that [Image] U.S. [Moody] Windows crashes cost workers billions of dollars each [Image] year in lost productivity. [Image] POLITICS (Michael Dougan for ABCNEWS.com) [Image] [Image] WORLD [Image] Special to ABCNEWS.com S U M M A R Y [Image] BUSINESS [Image]Itıs an article of faith in the [Image] high-tech industry that computers [Image] make workers more productive. The Computers are [Image] TECHNOLOGY efficiencies introduced by personal supposed to make us all more productive ‹ [Image] computers, experts like Bill Gates and but then thereıs the [Image] SCIENCE Esther Dyson have long assured us, will Windows factor. bring about a quantum leap in productivity [Image] not seen since the invention of the wheel. [Image] HEALTH&LIVING Related Stories [Image] And it seemingly makes sense. Put a [Image] computer more powerful than a 1960s [Image] TRAVEL mainframe into the hands of every single Productivity [Image] office worker in your company, and it Rise Slows [Image] ESPN SPORTS stands to reason that he or she can in 2Q produce reams of work in far less time [Image] [Image] than it would have taken in [Image] ENTERTAINMENT pre-Information Age times. [Image] Unfortunately, itıs not true. [Image] WEATHER.com The Solow Paradox [Image] Nobel laureate and economist Robert Solow, ³You can see the [Image] REFERENCE in what The Economist calls ³the Solow computer age paradox,² noted a few years ago that ³you [Image] can see the computer age everywhere these everywhere these days [Image] LOCAL days except in the productivity except in productivity [Image] statistics.² In fact, economists have long statistics.² [Image] ABCNEWS ON TV puzzled over the fact that, while Robert Solow, computers have undoubtedly helped fuel the [Image] long economic boom, overall productivity Economist has remained stagnant. TECH HEADLINES (Productivity, for those of you who [Image] slept through Econ 101, is the ratio of Instant inputs to outputs. The fewer man-hours you Messaging put in for a given number of cars, or Battle Rages soccer balls, or corporate litigations, On the higher your productivity.) [Image] A R C H I V E [Image] This, of course, amounts to heresy. Fred Moody: Indeed, a recent Commerce Department [Image] Crashing and report concluded that ³Value added per Read Fred Moodyıs Burning With worker in IT-producing industries grew at past columns[Image] Windows an annual average of 10.4 percent in the [Image] 1990s.² HOT TOPIC: Which should silence the Solows of 'The Plot to the world once and for all, right? Get Bill Alas, like the statistic in the joke Gates' about the man who drowned in a creek with [Image] an average depth of six inches, this number is deceptively reassuring. It turns Networks out that productivity growth in computer Invest in manufacturing ‹ a sector notorious for the Personalized prodigious efficiencies forced on it by TV crushing competitive pressures ‹ improved [Image] at the rate of 42 percent per year from NYSE Stocks 1995 to 1999, according to a study done by Will Be Northwestern University economist Robert Trading After Gordon. If you remove computer Hours manufacturing from the rest of the information economy, Gordon writes, productivity since 1995 ³has been abysmal rather than admirable.² [Image] [Image]SPECIAL The Real Culprit SERVICES This seems impossible. Anyone old enough [Image] to have performed the same work he or she now does back in the precomputer age can Shopping Guide tell you that they get far more work done [Image] in the same amount of time, and do it $10 billion here and [Image] Home better. $15 billion there, But the numbers donıt lie. and pretty soon Buying Information may in one way or another be youıre talking real [Image] [Image]folded, collated, stapled and filed faster productivity loss. [Image] and more figuratively than ever before, Homework Help but it still is not being turned into [Image] profit any more efficiently. In fact, if [Image] Tech Gordon is to be believed, workers may actually be less efficient now than in the Store precomputer age. Which raises the [Image] interesting question, ³How come?² [Image] Many sleepless nights spent in pondering this question have led me to the [Image] conclusion that Microsoftıs Windows is to [Image] SEARCH blame. No matter how frantically and [Image] frequently Microsoft upgrades or fixes or [Image] ABC.com replaces or enhances its operating system [Image] (exercises, it should be noted, that in [Image] THE themselves cost companies huge sums spent on installing new software and retraining CENTURY their workforces), the damned thing [Image] crashes and crashes and crashes. And every [Image] EMAIL time a computer freezes up in the ABCNEWS.com workplace, at least one document is lost [Image] or damaged. [Image] SEND PAGE TO A Billion Here, A Billion There A FRIEND So letıs do some calculating of our own, [Image] shall we? [Image] TOOLS AND Letıs assume that every information worker in the United States suffers a HELPERS computer crash, on the average, of once [Image] per day ‹ hardly an exaggeration. And [Image] letıs say that each crash results in a minimum of two hours spent retrieving, repairing or replacing a lost document. There are at the very least 1 million Americans whose work on a given day [Image] depends, one way or another, on a computer running Windows. If we assign an average value per document of $40 ‹ a conservative estimate, considering the cost in human and computing resources per document produced ‹ thatıs 40 million bucks a day down the tubes. Thus we can assume an aggregate annual loss in productivity of somewhere between $10 and $15 billion. Now, in a country with a GDP of around $8 trillion, that may not sound like much. But $10 billion here and $15 billion there, and pretty soon youıre talking real productivity loss. In other words, weıre fighting a losing battle by throwing more computing power at our worker-productivity problem. The more computers we bring into the workplace, the more resources we spend repairing system-crash damage and the more overall productivity is lost. Until growth slows in the computer-manufacturing sector, weıll continue to live a pipe dream, comforting ourselves with false productivity-growth numbers. And until Windows gets replaced by a more stable operating system, weıll still toss away billions of dollars each year in computer crashes. [Image] Fred Moody is the author of I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier and of The Visionary Position: The Inside Story of the Digital Dreamers Who Made Virtual Reality a Reality. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays. [Image] SEARCH ABCNEWS.com FOR MORE ON Š [Image] [Image] Copyright İ1999 ABC News Internet Ventures. 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