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Robert Gordon, an economics professor at Northwestern University, argues that computer-driven productivity gains may be undermeasured, but so what? They are no more wrongly estimated, he says, than in precomputer decades. Besides, computers are not exactly brand-new: commercial mainframes date back more than 40 years; PCs, 15 or 20 years. In all that time, they should have had greater impact, even on measured productivity...
...from being truly productive is that these damn human beings keep getting in the way." Many jobs cannot be fully automated: "Planes will always need two pilots and trucks a driver." Computers cannot replace beauticians, gardeners or restaurant chefs. Moreover, there is the law of diminishing returns: the latest PCs do not represent as great an advance over earlier computers as the first did over typewriters, or as typewriters did over writing by hand. Says Gordon: "I cannot type or think any faster than I did with my first personal computer in 1983, although it contained only one-fiftieth...
Stanford economist Timothy Bresnahan argues that this is more a problem with PCs than with large business computers, where upgrades are handled by professional managers. But changing systems can be a serious problem for medium-size businesses too. Insurance Management Associates, a commercial insurance brokerage firm, has just laid out more than $1 million to install a new computer operating system. In the Denver office alone, says president Robert Cohen, "we had 2,500 hours of training for 70 employees and kept the business running while handling the usual glitches and two-hour breakdowns, as well as the three days...
...Macintosh. Grove told TIME last week that he believes the extraordinary growth of the Internet is leading the industry into what he calls "the Valley of Death," a chaotic, destructive period of turmoil in which "the players will change, the technology will change and the devices will change." The PCs that sit on most people's desktops today are essentially general-purpose computers to which networking has been added as an afterthought. Future computers, Grove says, will be networking machines that also do computing. And what will the next generation of PCs look like? "The iMac embodies...
While still at PCS, Riegel accepted roles on various television shows, including "As the World Turns," "Guiding Light," and "Late Night with Conan O' Brien...