Re: Is strong typing worth the cost?

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@attbi.com>]

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've worked on a couple of these studies, and there is really vicious 
infighting over the definition of productivity.  If you use a bean 
counter definition of productivity, like customer calls handled or memos 
written productivity will usually go down.  If you use a market 
definition of productivity such as corporate ROI, productivity goes way 
up with PCs.

But my favorite "two-faced" study was done by Ford Motor Company many 
years ago.  They looked at the support and capital costs of  Unix 
workstations vs. Multics.  Multics cost about four times as much per 
user.  But when they looked into the details, the costs per task were 
very similiar.  They then turned the data around, and at a low level, 
Multics users accomplished about four times as much design work as 
workstation users. At a high level, a design done using workstations 
cost about as much as a design done using Multics.  Finally, they found 
that this was because similar projects had similar design budgets. ;-) 
Projects done on Multics tended, in a cost benefit tradeoff to use a 
much lower cost in terms of man hours for similar tasks, and therefore 
do much more (computer) analysis as part of an overall design project.

So it turned out that the middle managers had the right information all 
along.  Their screaming about being forced to use Unix workstations, 
which resulted in the study being done, was correct.  But if Ford hadn't 
looked carefully at the data, the budgets imposed on the products would 
have colored the results. (Instead they spent over $10 million on new 
Multics hardware.)

Now I am not arguing that Multics would be better than today's Unix 
workstations.  Workstations have come a long way since then.  Just that 
you have to be very careful when doing such a study not to define the 
study in a way that determines the results in advance.