Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge Review

Here's a technology that will really change your life - Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge (BOOK). No wires. No electric circuits. No batteries. Nothing to be connected or switched on. So easy to use, even a child can operate it. Compact and portable. Can be used anywhere - even sitting in an armchair by the fire - yet it is powerful enough to hold as much information as a CD-ROM disc.

Amazingly, there are a lot of these BOOKs available on sustainable computing, some of which were written over ten years ago! One of these is The Squandered Computer, written in 1996 by some 'author' (that's what bloggers were called back then) who showed up for breakfast when the words 'Paul Strassman' were shouted. Frankly, I don't know how he got away with writing about this stuff; sure, he was CIO at General Foods, Kraft, and Xerox. Big deal; so he had a few billion to play around with annually.

The Squandered Computer is full of little horror stories about waste in the IT industry. Like in 1995, U.S. corporate spending for computers was about $500 billion - that exceeded the sum of 1995 corporate profits by $175 billion. Or that computer magazines have the tendency to popularize examples of excellence in computer usage, and disregard financial results (good thing that doesn't happen today!) Or, despite a 67% growth in computer spending, overhead costs of U.S. firms grew faster than their growth in revenues or profits. If you want a good footing as to why mountains of eWaste are piling up in China, and why every employee still gets a desktop computer, reading this BOOK is a good start.