Productivity and the Future of Computing

By James Kwak

Google (GOOG) announced the Google Chrome “Operating System” a few days ago, and the world I used to live in is abuzz with people talking about the earthquake this represents for the computing industry. TechCrunch says, “Google Drops a Nuclear Bomb on Microsoft.” Leo Babauta of Zen Habits has a more thoughtful response, but also subscribes to the “future of computing” theme: “Google is moving everything online, and I really believe this is the future of computing. The desktop model of computing — the Microsoft (MSFT) era — is coming to an end. It’ll take a few years, but it will happen.”

The basic idea is that the future is all about connectivity. All your data and apps will be in the sky (on servers that you can access from anywhere). And, according to Babauta, the way we use computers is also changing:

While the business world has long used Microsoft Word to create rich documents full of formatting and charts, the increasingly mobile world doesn’t care about any of that. We send emails and text messages and tweets and messages on Facebook and forums and other social media — with no formatting at all. We do blog posts that have bold and italics and links and photos and videos and not much more in terms of formatting text.

We don’t need feature-bloated Microsoft Word anymore. Nor Excel, with its 2 million features, nor PowerPoint (who likes to watch slides?). Sure, there are still some great desktop apps that people use, for photo and video editing and much more … but the majority of us don’t need those. We need to communicate simply and quickly, without hassle.

I’m sympathetic to this picture, in part because I work on several different computers at different times. I already store a lot of my information on the Internet (including all my law school notes, which are accessible to all my classmates); I use web apps where feasible, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs (for lightweight work), Google Reader, Google Sites, Flickr, this blog, and so on. But I think there are a couple of holes in this story.

The small hole is that Google Chrome OS just doesn’t add up for me (even though Google Chrome is my favorite browser). In the old parlance, it isn’t even an operating system; it’s what used to be called an “operating environment.” The OS is Linux; Google Chrome OS is just the layer on top that you can see and touch.

More importantly, Google Chrome OS looks to me like a crippled version of Ubuntu (a popular desktop flavor of Linux), which is also free and open source. I recently installed Ubuntu on an old laptop, and I mainly just use the browser (Firefox). But if I need or want to use other applications on the laptop itself, I can; for example, if I’m doing some blogging and I want to download some data into a spreadsheet, I can. (Don’t try telling me that Google Docs has a spreadsheet program that’s usable for anything other than adding and subtracting, at least not yet.) Or I can play MP3s via the MP3 player, instead of having to stream them from some web site. With Google Chrome OS, all I’ve got is the browser. The only compensating advantage I can think of is that it should start up faster than Ubuntu, but since Ubuntu rarely needs to be rebooted, that doesn’t matter much.

The big and more interesting hole is that all this “future of computing” talk should come with an asterisk, with a note saying: “Applies only to personal computing by consumers with limited needs.” The technology media tend to think that the state of computing is reflected in the tools that they use: netbooks, built-in 3G wireless, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, etc. But I would submit that the computing that really matters is the kind that goes on inside companies.

Brad Delong recently cited Robert Allen on the central role of “productivity-raising machinery” in the transformation of the first industrial revolution into the second industrial revolution and a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. Recently, people have talked about computer technology playing a similar role in boosting productivity across the economy, although on a smaller scale. But if computers are going to increase productivity and thereby our standards of living, it is not (or not primarily) because they make it easy to create and view pictures of cats with misspelled captions, entertaining though that is.

And there, where it really matters, at least from a macro-economic perspective, the future of computing is a long, long way off. If you hypothesize a uniform unit of “work” done by computers used in businesses – and I mean useful work accomplished, not calculations performed – all of my own observations indicate that the vast majority of this work is still being done by old-fashioned mainframe computers, and most of the rest is being done by those much-hated “client/server” systems.

I’m willing to allow the possibility that in some areas like manufacturing it’s possible that computers have made possible huge amounts of productivity-increasing automation. But in the mass services industries that I’m more familiar, like insurance, the efficiency gains provided by computers have been limited. Think about every time you have tried to do something simple at an airport – like change your frequent flyer number – and watched as the agent typed code after code after code. Or all the times your customer service representative couldn’t answer the simplest question on the phone. My company, which does something so boring no technology writer would ever dream of writing about it, has been pretty successful because we picked an industry that was vastly underutilizing or misusing technology, and we built systems that, while far better than anything our customers had before, are not at the bleeding edge of software.

The big problem in the way most large companies use computer technology is not the software per se; it’s the complexity of conceptualizing, designing, building, and testing huge applications involving millions of lines of code to manage business processes in new and better ways, when those new and better ways can only be dimly glimpsed from the perspective of the current situation. Planning and running these projects is something that most companies are admittedly bad at. The example closest to the usual themes of this blog would be the failure of the mortgage servicing companies to get their modification programs off the ground, in part because they can’t get the systems and processes in place quickly enough. But this happens over and over again in virtually all large companies.

And for me, this is actually a reason to be hopeful. The potential for information technology to improve productivity is still enormous, and we don’t need netbooks or cloud computing or new operating systems or quantum computers to get there. The hardware and software tools of today – or of five years ago – would work just fine, if companies could figure out how to apply and implement them successfully and repeatably. From the point of view of the economy, whether college students are using Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, or Google Chrome OS in five years really doesn’t matter.

I don’t think the people talking about Google Chrome OS would actually disagree with this; they’re just more interested in knowing what tools they will be using in the future. But given that our economy has to figure out some way to increase productivity growth for the long term, the important question is whether companies will figure out how to use existing technology more effectively. The information technology industry is very, very immature. It can improve a lot.

Comments

[Mabeldenton:]

Mr. President why are the banking,and loan company not making loans as you promised they would do for the american people we are all hurting and not getting any help. Time for them to answer to you for not helping us the little people that keep them in business, maybe we should boycott their business. Check obamamortgage2009.blog...

Jul 11 01:09 AM

[Adam855:]

The concept of having everything run through the web is not new by any means. The reality though is that Windows has been declared "dead" multiple times in the past, only to be proven again and again quite sticky. Their "moat" continues to be mainly the gigantic installed base of windows software, which in many cases is difficult to extricate from businesses who rely upon them. This code can get rewritten, recompiled, and replaced over time, but it will take longer than anyone thinks. Supporting this are the skill sets and habits of the workforce, which becomes more computer savvy and able to change all the time, but still will resist change in some areas.
Mac OS from Apple is an example of an OS that is superior to Windows in most ways, but has made only incremental gains in market share (even in the less sticky consumer market) due in large part to the above.
The OS in general is becoming less and less relevant due to the web, and I think it will become almost completely irrelevant, but I'd say 10-20 years is more likely for that to occur. Google Chrome is therefore not nearly as significant as some pundits have made it out to be.
I agree with your article for the most part, especially your statement that "The information technology industry is very, very immature".

Jul 11 08:50 AM

[kruser53:]

This discussion reminds me, in some ways, of the discussion about the PC in the 80's. Back then only a few foresaw the role that the microprocessor would play in future technology. What has happened since is that the boundary between PCs, servers and many mainframes is simply the number of microprocessors under the control of one CPU.

It is not that I think that application software will necessarily go the down the same path, but there may be some faintly parallel (to the hardware story) future for software. If so, there will be great wealth to those who pursue it and ruin for those who miss out.

Jul 11 10:51 AM

[Leftfield:]

The "failure of mortgage service companies to get their modification programs off the ground" and the "computing that matters" in business touches on the fact that computing power has been grossly misused and abused thus far as a self-serving process rather than as labor saver. Countless reams of paperwork are generated to make work for staffs and confuse, rather than help the recipient. My insurance company abused this technology plenty when I needed to make a claim and my bank manager couldn't read my basic checking statement (two important mistakes). And, instead of a (usually incompetent, nowadays) live person, you get "help" menus written apparently by nerds without a basic concept of English language and approved by a company staff that has nary a clue of customer needs.
The fact that computers have been primarily used to generate blizzards of useless or confusing paperwork and obliterate useful information help desks shows that they haven't begun to be employed effectively in business.
The present model will probably remain in government as I don't believe they actually want to help people anyway.

Jul 11 11:14 AM

[derryl:]

Leftfield wrote,
"The fact that computers have been primarily used to generate blizzards of useless or confusing paperwork and obliterate useful information help desks shows that they haven't begun to be employed effectively in business. "

Right on. Remember the 'paperless office' that was going to arise because of computers? Reality is the paper blizzard you describe because it's so easy and cool to pump out reams of colorful trash.

And 'productivity gains' from computerization? About 10 years ago some economist did a study which concluded that while there were limited instances where computers actually increased productivity, for the most part all they did was increase the amount of time workers spend learning new computer programs.

And who hasn't been tempted to smash their computer with a sledgehammer when Word keeps automatically screwing up your document with 'correction' features? In the 80s I used a Commodore 64 with WordWriter5 that had all the formatting features I ever needed. I could do up to 10 pages of text at a time and because all formatting was manual and visible I could always get the document to look the way I wanted. I had a cheat sheet taped to the top of the keyboard with all the formatting functions written on it. It's nice to have unlimited capacity in modern computers but I would really like to be able to buy a simple word processing program without the million unnecessary 'features' that just make the program confusing to use. Our SA comments have zero formatting features and are perfectly readable text. That's all most of us want or need.

The single most effective way to reduce gas consumption is to synchronize traffic lights. The technology exists to install smart traffic lights everywhere, but we still have stupid lights that turn red in the middle of nowhere with no other vehicle to be seen, except the cop waiting for you to run the stupid light. Meanwhile small to medium size cities spend billions on fantasy public transit that runs at capacity during rush hours but for the rest of the day just blocks car traffic.

I don't know why we aren't using computers to actually improve productivity in some of these ways. One reason may be that the people who could use the technology do not know it exists or do not know how to use it. It's hard enough trying to connect a new computer to the Net with Windows telling you 'contact administrator' because the instructions use terms only familiar to geeks who just took the 6 month course on networking. It's probably beyond the ken of traffic bureaucrats to adopt technology that saves gas and makes traffic flow more smoothly.

Jul 11 09:39 PM

[LilBob:]

Computers won't really become engines of efficiency in business until Henry Ford's "Time and Motion," ideas are rigorously applied to software design. Too many software programs put in unnecessary steps and clicks-along with the unneeded features like you mentioned. Another problem with computers is that they've spawned an age of distraction where people seem to think it's their right to waste company time watching Youtube videos or downloading new screen-savers while they are at work.

The future of computers will most likely involve cloud computing and a return to the "dumb terminal," model of the 1980s, with employees only having access to those parts of the system essential to the performance of their job. I see the desktop pc as an outmoded concept for business nowadays. The over-abundance of information and distraction actually makes people less productive. This represents a tremendous opportunity for young techies: the first person to design a really effective portable, modular approach to software management that provides access to critical work functions while precluding whole web access will be the winner.

Jul 12 08:43 AM