The 30th anniversary of PacMan was commemorated by google, by placing an interactive pacman doodle on its search homepage. The pacman game could be played by clicking on “Insert Coin” button in place of “I’m feeling lucky” that usually appears beside the google search button, giving it a retro feel. I had tried it on that day, and it worked well.
Now, the people have come up with the analysis saying that, 5 million man hours were lost due to people at workplace indulging in the game on that day. An estimated $ 120 million was the worth of the lost productivity. The analysis goes further to calculate the number of people from google that could be hired to form a team of work force, including Larry Page and Serger Brin for six weeks.
Oh these analysts! How many man hours have they wasted in researching on such useless figures and facts!! Never once in the news report was there a mention of all the man hours gained by using google all this while.
Majority of the people using computers rely on google for all the answers to their questions. Developers search codes on google, so as to make a short work of their projects. Historians search up facts on google to give a miss to that detour to the library. Foodaholics google for recipes, tech freaks google for gadgets. Almost every computer googles for data half the time. I know a person who visits any website only after searching it on google, even though he has the entire web address. A common belief goes that, if all the google servers are down for a single day, industry will be brought to standstill for the lack of information. Such is the influence of google in our life. It truely has added hours into our days.
If I were to analyse a blackout of google, I would dare say that the industry stands to loose many times the figure reported in above news.
All said, Pacman has found a permanent place on google.
BTW, I think that, Tony Wright, the founder of Rescue Time, the “analyst”, mentioned above, must have used google to come to the reported figures.