Like many things technological, new devices are an additional resource for people to use, but don’t necessarily supplant more traditional resources.
For example, vinyl record sales which were supposed to disappear with the arrival of CDs and later digital downloads, are still popular with increased sales every year. In spite of all the electronics available, look around and see how many people still buy and wear, that very old technology, the wristwatch.
Now with the advent of GPS, and various cell phone apps, comes news the good old paper map is still quite popular.
Patty Brown is manager of the Canadian Automobile Association branch in Windsor, Ontario.
She says in south-central Ontario alone, the CAA still provides 100,000 paper road maps a year.
“Well you’ve heard all of the reports: the GPS led me into the water; the GPS led me into the mountain, that type of thing. So, [the map] is just the backup to use along with it,” Brown said.
However, electronics are making their presence felt. The province of Ontario prior to 2006 printed some 800,000 free roadmaps a year, now it’s down to a little over 400,000
In a related note on technology, Italian sports car maker Ferrari raised IT eyebrows this week after it issued a directive to its employees to cut down the number of group emails they send, and talk to their co-workers instead.
“From now on, each Ferrari employee will only be able to send the same email to three people in-house,” a statement on the company’s website said. The firm said irrelevant emails waste too much time and told employees, “talk to each other more and write less.
Meanwhile, Global technology giant Atos, a French firm with 80.000 employees world-wide, also announced that it will stop using internal email by 2014.
The company said an internal review found that on average, employees spend 15 to 20 hours a week on email, and only 15 per cent of the emails are actually useful. It’s looking at alternativs
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