Jobs: How Many Hours Are You Willing to Work? - Newsweek.com. How to measure productivity. Today I read a really thought provoking post by Jack Vinson entitled The Fun of Productivity Measures. He takes a look at how we address productivity in the modern {insert-your-descriptor-here] economy. As a technology professional, I care a lot about productivity. It's one of the great words that technology people (especially vendors) like to throw out there. In practice though, productivity often means "whatever I can assert that is favorable to my pitch. " Frankly, we have got to get beyond this, because it is a serious boat anchor holding us back. Jack boils it down nicely when he writes: What to measure? What are you in the business of doing? I remember back in the "good old days" at Honeywell, when Larry Bossidy was CEO, he measured productivity as the change in company revenue over the change in company cost.
In IT this had a really interesting effect. This meant I couldn't justify a project with a statement like this... "But wait," you cry. What about customer satisfaction?
Bringing Silicon Valley to Sacramento: Why Entrepreneurs Need to. Most people don’t realize this, but Northern California actually has two giant technology centers: Silicon Valley and Sacramento. Silicon Valley is the world’s entrepreneurship capital, and Sacramento is California’s State capital. They are less than 100 miles away from each other. But technologically, they’re light-years apart. While Silicon Valley’s workers conceive the next revolution in technology, Sacramento’s workers toil away at maintaining computer systems that were built in the tech equivalent of the Mesozoic era. Witness the problems that the state experienced last November when it couldn’t issue checks to unemployed workers whose benefits had run out before Congress authorized a payment extension.
This is the tip of the iceberg. California isn’t alone in having such legacy systems and challenges. There was a time when there was a big difference between these enterprise systems and the PC and Web applications that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs build. Mozilla Firefox. Sales of video game hardware and software remained sluggish in the United States, as overall sales fell 13 percent in January to $1.17 billion, compared with the same period last year, reported the NPD Group. Hardware sales took the largest hit, dropping 21 percent to $353.7 million, down from $446.8 million in January 2009.
Software sales slipped 12 percent, to $597.3 million. The lone bright spot in the report was a 2 percent increase in video game accessories, bringing in a total of $217 million. The motion-sensitive Nintendo Wii console continued to be a top seller, leading the hardware competition with 465,800 units sold. Microsoft claimed second place for January sales with 332,800 units of its Xbox 360 console sold, and Sony's PlayStation 3 console followed in third with 276,900 consoles sold. Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Corner Office - Tony Hsieh of Zappos - Celebrate Individuality -