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2.0 out of 5 stars
Sharing Is Good, But What Should Be Shared?, 28 May 2004
One of the primary benefits of a human nervous system is to allow the senses and the mind to be in close contact. This is most helpful to alerting us to opportunities and dangers so we respond more quickly.When the nervous sytem is working well, this is great. Disease can cause these signals to be scrambled, and the individual fares poorly. In this book, Mr. Gates argues persuasively for having a digital counterpart to the human nervous system. What he fails to focus on enough is how to identify what data to capture, how to turn data into knowledge, and how to turn knowledge into timely action. For those subjects, you'll have to read Bill Jensen's book on Simplicity. If you only have time to read one or the other, I suggest Simplicity over Business @ the Speed of Thought. The wired world easily overwhelms. Timely e-mails can turn into hundreds of e-mails. Data can turn into overwhelming quantities of confusion. Without the skills and tools to do data mining, the digital nervous sytem may just make things worse. Think about it. A reason for being concerned about this point is the history of Microsoft itself, usually having to buy or copy innovations by others to advance its technology . . . usually arriving after targeted dates with software that crashes all the time . . . usually arriving with software that is so filled with unecessary features that it runs more slowly than typewriters did in the predigital age. My sense from a recent site visit to Dell Computer is that Dell is far ahead of Microsoft in communicating and acting on information. I suggest you read Direct from Dell instead of this book if you only have time to read two books. From a man who is supposed to be a great visionary of technology, I was quite disappointed in this book. I only saw a flawed vision that was more backward looking than forward looking. This book wasn't timely when it came out . . . and time hasn't been good to its message.
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