Re: Survival characteristics
"There's plenty of evidence that PCs did not make managers more productive — quite the opposite, in fact, since dictating correspondence to experienced secretaries and having it produced by a dedicated typing pool is almost always going to be quite a lot faster than writing it in something like Outlook or Word, for example."
I'm just old enough to have worked as a messenger boy in an office where managers would often simply ask the secretary to send a 'hurry up' letter or a 'very sorry' letter for routine communications. These letters were so standard that the secretary just bashed one out on her Selectric and the manager signed it. So yes I take your point for written stuff.
I was more on about the spreadsheet allowing data based challenges to the centralised MIS systems of the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps because my later working life included that.
I also take your point about productivity decline. I have a feeling that we now measure and attempt to interpret a much larger volume of numerical data than previously simply because we can. I also have a feeling a lot of that data is quite noisy so people are trying to control random fluctuations and that does not work.
Icon: Happy new year all, I'm off out on a slightly less rainy day.