But today the personal computer, as the name suggests, is a tool for the individual, even in a large company. We think of and use a personal computer very personally to help us get our job done.
Those doing solo work can write, create newsletters, and explore new ideas better with a personal computer. A Luddite might ask, “If Churchill had used a word processor, would his writing have been better? Would Cicero have given better speeches in the Roman Senate?” Such critics have a notion that because great things were achieved without modern tools, it is presumptuous to suggest that better tools might elevate human potential. We can only speculate on how an artist’s output might be helped, but it is quite clear that personal computers improve business processes, efficiency, and accuracy. Consider the average reporter. There have been great journalists through history, but today it’s much easier to check facts, transmit a story from the field, and stay in touch electronically with news sources, editors, and even readers. Plus, the inclusion of high-quality diagrams and pictures has become easier. Just look at the presentation of science topics. Twenty or thirty years ago it was unusual to find top-quality scientific illustrations anywhere except in science books or a glossy specialized magazine such as Scientific American. Today some newspapers present science stories well, in part because they use personal-computer software to produce detailed drawings and illustrations rapidly.
Businesses of all sizes have received different benefits from personal computers. Small businesses arguably have been the greatest beneficiaries, because low-cost hardware and software have permitted tiny outfits to compete better with large multinational corporations. Big organizations tend to be specialized: one department writes brochures, another deals with accounting, yet another handles customer service, and so forth. When you call a large company to talk about your account, you expect a specialist to get you an answer pretty quickly.
Expectations for small-business operators used to be different, because they couldn’t hire specialists. When an individual opens a business or a shop, she is the one creating brochures, doing the financial work, and dealing with customers. It’s kind of amazing how many different tasks a small-business owner has to master. Someone running a small business can buy one PC and a few software packages, and she will have electronic support for all the different functions she is performing. The result is that a small business can compete more effectively with the big boys.
For a large company, the biggest benefit of personal computers comes from improving the sharing of information. PCs do away with the huge overhead large businesses incur staying coordinated through meetings, policies, and internal processes. Electronic mail has done more for big companies than for small companies.
One of the first ways Microsoft began using information tools internally was by phasing out printed computer reports. In many companies, when you go into a top executive’s office you see books of bound computer printouts with monthly financial numbers, dutifully filed away on a shelf. At Microsoft, those numbers are made available only on a computer screen. When someone wants more detail, he or she can examine it by time period, locale, or almost any other way. When we first put the financial reporting system on-line, people started looking at the numbers in new ways. For example, they began analyzing why our market share in one geographic area was different from our share somewhere else. As we all started working with the information, we discovered errors. Our data-processing group apologized. “We’re very sorry about these mistakes” they said, “but we’ve been compiling and distributing these numbers once a month for five years and these same problems were there all along and no one mentioned them.” People hadn’t really been using the print information enough to discover the mistakes.
The flexibility that comes from having the information available electronically is hard to convey to a nonuser. I rarely look at our financial reports on paper anymore, because I prefer to view them electronically.
When the first electronic spreadsheets appeared in 1978, they were a vast improvement over paper and pencil. What they made possible was putting formulas behind each element in a table of data. These formulas could refer to other elements of the table. Any change in one value would immediately affect the other cells, so projections such as sales, growth, or changes in interest rates could be played with to examine “what if” scenarios, and the impact of every change would be instantly apparent.
Some current spreadsheets let you view tables of data in different ways. Simple commands permit the filtering and sorting of the data. The spreadsheet application I know best, Microsoft Excel, includes a feature called a pivot table that allows you to look at summarized information in nearly countless ways. It’s number-crunching made easy. The summarizing criterion can be changed with the click of a mouse on a selector or by using the mouse to drag a column header from one side of the table to another. It’s simple to change the information from a high-level summary report to an analysis of any data category or to an examination of the details one by one.
Monthly a pivot table is distributed electronically to all Microsoft managers containing sales data by office, product, and sales channel for current and previous fiscal years. Each manager can quickly construct a personal view of the data for his or her requirements. Sales managers might compare sales in their region to budget or the prior year. Product managers can look at their products’ sales by country and sales channel. There are thousands of possibilities just a click and a drag away.
Increases in computer speed will soon allow PCs to display very high quality three-dimensional graphics. These will permit us to show data in a more effective way than today’s two-dimensional presentations. Other advances will make it easy to explore databases by posing questions orally. An example might be, “What products are selling best?”
These innovations will first show up in the mainstream in the high-volume office-productivity packages: word processors, spreadsheets, presentation packages, databases, and electronic mail. Some proponents claim these tools are so capable already that there will never be a need for newer versions. But there were those who thought that about software five and ten years ago. Over the next few years, as speech recognition, social interfaces, and connections to the information highway are incorporated into core applications, I think individuals and companies will find the productivity enhancements these improved applications will bring extremely attractive.
The greatest improvement in productivity, and the greatest change in work habits, will be brought about because of networking. The original use for the PC was to make it easier to create documents that were printed on paper and shared by passing around the printed output. The first PC networks allowed people to share printers and store files on central servers. Most of these early networks connected fewer than twenty computers together. As networks get larger, they are being connected to one another and to the Internet so that every user is able to communicate with everyone else. Today, communications are mostly short text files, but eventually they will include the full richness of the documents discussed in chapter 6. Increasingly, companies that want to provide the benefits of document-sharing to every employee have installed extensive networks, often at substantial cost. For example, Microsoft’s subsidiary in Greece pays more for its connection to our worldwide network than it pays in salaries.