The key issue with low ROI of computing, especially in terms of productivity, is essentially that too much of the investment was in MS Windows _personal_ computing and too little in real collaboration. Corporations purchased boatloads of PCs and on which people mainly used standalone personal applications that were never integrated into any business process except by sneakernet. Workflow around Microsoft Word or Excel is ludicrous, but that's what a business really needs. Most of the "wow" spreadsheets and "cool" presentations were squandering the time of the so-called "knowledge workers" who in reality needed INTEGRATED business intelligence and data access.

As a Mac user, my biggest laugh of the 1990's was watching Windows users endlessly gripe about poor performance of their latest PC while Mac users like myself were contentedly using three-year-old applications on six-year-old machines. The problem was not system performance -- it was that these machines were not getting work done and these people's frustration was woefully misdirected.

PCs became another office-worker perk instead of an integrated part of business operations. And the FUD was that all your competitors were getting good value from PCs so you better get PCs too. And your knowledge workers would be unhappy if they couldn't have a PC on their desk to play Solitaire -- er, I mean, to run data analysis spreadsheets (with poor quality snapshots of erratically derived corporate data).

So in my opinion, the paradox only LOOKS like usability. The problem was that the whole personal-computer mantra was never oriented towards corporate business processes. It doesn't matter how usable Excel is -- if you leave your knowledge workers cut off from live access to corporate data, they might as well be playing Solitaire for all the good it's doing.

The world's first office computer, known as LEO, was created in the 1950s by Lyons, the British teashop giant. Its aim was to replace the thousands of clerks who did the billing, invoicing, and stocktaking, and also tracked the supply and demand of sticky buns and cups of tea that the public were consuming. Its success lay not in the technology it employed, but because it made the company more efficient by streamlining what was previously a very labor-intensive business process. It benefited Lyons, which cut costs and had more control of corporate information, and it also benefited the thirsty public who had enough cakes, sandwiches, and cups of tea to see them through their seaside weekends, rain or shine.

]]]] While companies implement cost savings by outsourcing help desks to far-flung time zones and attempting to put their customers many touch-tone menus away from the real people left on their help-desk support staff, they are doing the equivalent of decorating the entrance hall to their corporate offices with uncomfortable chairs, shabby carpets, and impersonal service. [[[[

Well put. Hear, hear.