From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,LOTS_OF_MONEY autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,d89b08801f2aacae X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-05-26 09:55:24 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!nycmny1-snh1.gtei.net!news.gtei.net!news-out.visi.com!hermes.visi.com!cox.net!news-east.rr.com!chnws02.ne.ipsvc.net!cyclone.ne.ipsvc.net!24.128.8.70!typhoon.ne.ipsvc.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3CF113D6.40601@attbi.com> From: "Robert I. Eachus" Organization: Eachus Associates User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.4.1) Gecko/20020314 Netscape6/6.2.2 X-Accept-Language: en,pdf MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Is strong typing worth the cost? References: <4519e058.0204290722.2189008@posting.google.com> <3CCE8523.6F2E721C@earthlink.net> <3CCFFE11.F0CBE6FE@despammed.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Sun, 26 May 2002 16:51:11 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.61.239.24 X-Complaints-To: abuse@attbi.com X-Trace: typhoon.ne.ipsvc.net 1022431871 24.61.239.24 (Sun, 26 May 2002 12:51:11 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 26 May 2002 12:51:11 EDT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:24834 Date: 2002-05-26T16:51:11+00:00 List-Id: 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.