Chris Writes.

So I’m attending this conference in San Francisco, which started yesterday.  I’m attending for a simple reason: finding tech apps that will assist and improve collaboration.  One of the first speakers yesterday was Andrew McAfee, an HBS professor who teaches IT courses to biz folks.  He said a few things that resonated with me:

Users are three things: Social, busy, and biased.

This bias manifests itself in what he calls the 9x effect: people overvalue what they have by a factor of 3, and undervalue new stuff by a factor of 3.  So something needs to be 10x better than what you have to overcome the overbias of what you have, and the underbias of the new thing.  When we began using CELUM Imagine to manage our digital files, it was infinity-times better than what we had because we had (essentially) nothing.  In the case of sharing spreadsheets or other office documents, I think we’re still a bit far away from 10x improvements over what we currently have (emailing files between one another, and/or shared network drives).  But the guys at Zoho and the new office apps from Google are getting darn close.