Are Computers Great Or What? The Productivity Paradox

A familiar occurrence. Your wonderful vacation in California is nearing an end and it's time for your fall semester at college. Airline reservations made months ago assure your arrival ten hours before your first scheduled class. Your cheap tickets route you through two different cities before your final destination. Your first flight goes smoothly and on time—about 60 minutes to fly 500 miles. But now trouble begins. The next stop is glazed over with ice due to freezing rain. Flight delayed. Too many hours later you're on the way again. You arrive just in time to tell your professor why you weren't in class. This was not productive!

Why talk about commercial jet travel when we want to focus on computers? I believe there is an important analogy between them. Both are fast. The one in moving people, freight, and mail while the other, the computer, has humanly speaking, blinding speed to compute, communicate, and store data. And, as we will discuss below, both machines are embedded in systems that may not be taking advantage of that speed with the result that productivity is less than expected.