Google PAC-MAN Cost 4.8M Person-Hours 332
The folks at Rescue-Time, who make software that helps you (and companies) figure out how you spend your online time, did a modest calculation based on their user base and concluded that Google's playable PAC-MAN doodle cost the world over 4.8 million person-hours of productivity last Friday. "Google PAC-MAN consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6M daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day). $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, if the average Google user has a cost of $25/hr. (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate). For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get six weeks of their time."
Also, Google made the doodle permanent.
Yum, numbers are tasty (Score:5, Funny)
Now the real question is, how many more hours will it consume talking about how many hours it consumed?
Begs the question doesn't it?
Hah! (Score:3, Funny)
Simon.
Slashdot manages that every day (Score:5, Funny)
You should be ashamed of yourselves for reading my post when you should be off curing cancer or saving orphans or something useful!
cost calculation? (Score:2, Funny)
OK, so I'm just a really dumb C programmer, but I'm having a hard time parsing "cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate" and coming up with a value of $25/hr for any value of "pay rate". And I've wasted more time on this than I did futzing with Google's PacMan...
Updated Synopsis (Score:4, Funny)
The first thing I said (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Competition (Score:5, Funny)
Re:hour of pac-man != hour of lost productivity (Score:5, Funny)
This is like all those bogus RIAA/MPAA/etc.-funded studies that assume a pirated copy is a lost sale. Much of the time spent on Google's PAC-MAN would otherwise have been spent on other internet time-wasting, not on productivity.
Great. Now some *AA is busy working on a study to show how much Google PAC-MAN cost them in sales. Way to go (don't expect to get paid for the idea though).
Wish somebody told me earlier (Score:3, Funny)
I kept wondering how the fuck a Google banner could be responsible for lost productivity. I am on Google all the time searching for stuff and saw it once and thought cool and moved on....
Till today when I found out it was fucking playable.
So yeah, there is going to be some lost productivity due to this, but it will take decades for Google to get anywhere near the records set by Minesweeper and Solitaire.
Re:Slashdot manages that every day (Score:1, Funny)
Are you saying orphans aren't useful?
Re:Yum, numbers are tasty (Score:5, Funny)
These numbers are tasty, but they also are misleading and jump to conclusions. They're assuming everyone who tried GoogleMan was at work?
That's irrelevant if you're a salaried worker. Instead of playing Google Pac-Man at home, you could have spent that extra time at work getting work done for your employer. Wasting your time playing a game like that is like stealing from your employer!
Re:BREAKING NEWS!!!! MICROSOFT FIGHT BACK... (Score:3, Funny)
I thought, knowing Microsoft, that they would instead make a unique game featuring Clippy or Bob or that little dog. And the object of the game would be to defeat the evil free-software hordes.
Muh-wah-hah-hah-hah... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Fortunately (Score:3, Funny)
It doesn't matter if your life is boring. Wasting time on games, or anything non-work-related, is stealing from your employer. Get back to work!
-- Management
Re:Competition (Score:4, Funny)
Pac-person - a gender neutral abstract object of a neutral colour moves around a maze not eating vegan dots (or stripes) while not antagonising the neutral "ghosts" (or any ethereal creature) who wish only to have lunch with Pac-person and not harm them in any way. Game does not include a "score" function as scores are considered "competitive" and detract from the non-judgmental attitude of the Pac-person game.
Re:What about urination? (Score:1, Funny)
How much did people urinating cost?
I'd say it cost R Kelly a great deal.
Re:Humans are not engines (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Ah yes, Rescue Time... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:10 significant digits. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Competition (Score:3, Funny)
If you tell my youngest to draw a fireman/firefigher he'll just as likely draw a car with a clown driving it
... and will go on to explain that the clown *is* actually a fireman, but he's a clown as well and isn't on fireman duty today. Yeah, sounds a bit familiar.