ICT Productivity Friday, October 11, 2013

Looking back in time to see forward.

2013-10-19

From Krugman: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/the-ict-revolution-isnt-over/ What Id note, however, is that there is almost surely a second wind coming. The 1995-2007 productivity rise was basically a wired phenomenon, a lot of it having to do with local area networks rather than the Internet. Wireless data is a whole different thing, and its a surprisingly recent thing the iPhone was introduced in 2007, the iPad in 2010. And we know from repeated experience that it takes quite a while for new technologies to show up in economic growth, a point famously made by Paul David and confirmed by the 25-year lag between the introduction of the microprocessor and the 90s productivity takeoff. The chat below provides context for Krugmans observation above.

http://www.bls.gov/lpc/nfbbar.gif Interestingly, the 90s productivity uptick corresponded with the commercial rise of the Internet, post 94 when Mosaic rebranded at Netscape. This is Andreesen then. The stage set in the 80s saw the emergence of low-cost unix servers. This facilitated the diffusion of the Internet among Colleges and Universities. C and C++ became a regular part of the core Computer Science curriculum. The Reagan era layoffs from defense industries provided a ready supply of experienced unix managers and individual contributors.

ICT Productivity

Looking back in time to see forward.

2013-10-19

Together with the growing supply of entry level unix programmers being graduated, business enterprises could begin creating new systems more flexibly at lower costs than with mainframes. The Financial industry led the way. The 70s was the period of transition to the Third Generation Computers with multiprogramming operating systems and big random data handling systems. 1972 also marked the elimination of fixed fees on stock trading. They also were marked the opening of Capital Markets through Discount Brokerages like Schwab.

It is being sold as the Internet of Things. Creating a proto-Borg,