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

click here for more details, find new or used items	Bill Gates Used from £0.01 Pages: 496 (Hardcover) ISBN: 0446525685 Pub: Warner Books Pub date: 1999-03 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 622929

Reader Reviews:

Sharing Is Good, But What Should Be Shared? (0/0 people found this helpful)

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.

Contrast of Opinion (0/1 people found this helpful)

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 logically that some readers are extremely underestimating the value of the content while others are overestimating it. Should I read it ? Yes , and , I will try to give an objective opinion. So..Discard my ranking for the time being

Business @ the speed of thought (0/0 people found this helpful)

This book is incrediably boring and 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 and is hard to get past the first chapter...

so far so good (0/0 people found this helpful)

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 (0/0 people found this helpful)

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 and without revelations.

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