First, let’s lay down a marker by flashing back to the late Steve Jobs.
One of the things that bothered Steve Jobs was the time that it took to boot when the Mac was first powered on.
To motivate the designers, Jobs reportedly exhorted them:
“If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?”.
The engineer allowed that he probably could.
Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year.
A few weeks later the engineer had the Mac booting up twenty-eight seconds faster.
Keep that story in mind the next time that a digitized phone answerer asks you to “press or say 1 for English; press or say 2 for Spanish”.
Not a big deal, right?
It only takes about 5 seconds to work thru the prompts.
But take Jobs rules and multiply the 5 seconds times a few million calls per day getting the prompt and you’ve got a statistically significant number of “lost lives” … or at least, lost productivity.
Rather than getting better, it’s getting worse.
I have proof.
The Homa Files 