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From: Jeffrey Carter <jeffrey.carter@boeing.com>
Subject: Re: Is strong typing worth the cost?
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Date: 2002-05-02T20:17:05+00:00
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Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> I recall reading about the study several years ago as I was persuing an MBA.
> IIRC, the study involved looking at a number of companies that didn't have
> computerization in any significant way and then they invested large sums of
> money to put computers in place. By looking at, say, a case where a company
> invests $5m on computerization and looking at its output per employee, you
> would expect that this investment ought to result in more output per
> employee in some manner or it wasn't worth it. Apparently, the numbers
> didn't get better and the theory goes that employees did things like spend
> time putting together fancy, typeset memos where they used to just
> hand-scrawl something and show it to the xerox machine. So its not a forgone
> conclusion that computers make us more productive. And its not obvious that
> the reason for lack of productivity gains is because all the companies
> studied used Microsoft products. :-)

I recall a paper from the 1980's in which a group of English professors
reviewed a bunch of computer-prepared papers from students and found
that those prepared on PCs (DOS, non-WYSIWYG word processors) had better
content than those prepared on Macs. The presumed causal mechanism was
that people working on Macs invested effort in the appearance of the
papers that students working on PCs invested in the content of the
papers.

Are we far enough off topic yet?