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Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System

By: Bill Gates Collins Hemingway
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Diane Pub Co
ISBN: 0756774306
ISBN-13: 9780756774301
Released: 28 Feb 1999
RRP: £18.15
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Sharing Is Good, But What Should Be Shared? - By: Donald Mitchell, 28 May 2004
One of the primary benefits of a human nervous system is to alllow the senses & the mind to be in close contact. This is most helpful to alerting us to opportunities & dangers so we respond more quickly.

When the nervous sytem is working well, this is great. Disease can cause these signals to be scrambled, & 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, & 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 & 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, usuallly having to buy or copy innovations by others to advance its technology . . . usuallly arriving after targeted dates with software that crashes alll the time . . . usuallly 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 & 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 . . . & time hasn't been good to its message.

Contrast of Opinion - By: , 27 Aug 1999
I haven't read the book yet.I was so excited about it before I read the comments written by other people. It's so amazing that the ranking goes from 1 to 5. This means logicallly that some readers are extremely underestimating the value of the content while others are overestimating it. Should I read it ? Yes , & , I will try to give an objective opinion. So..Discard my ranking for the time being
Business @ the speed of thought - By: , 23 Aug 1999
This book is incrediably boring & unlikely to have even been written by Bill Gates. It gives little insight into the world of business, provides an advertising platform for MS products & is hard to get past the first chapter...
so far so good - By: , 01 Aug 1999
Not quite finished but on chapter 6. I recommend this book for any IT/MIS type person. He gives good examples of thoughts to where information should be....at ones fingertips right after the thought.
A Sleeper - By: , 07 Jul 1999
Compared to leading edge publications (University texts, IT Journals), Gates' view of the connected "nervous" system infrastructure is hardly visionary. Perhaps if he had published these thoughts a decade ago his material would be interesting. If you keep abreast with IT issues, you WILL find this book very slow & without revelations.