[techdmn]

I don't understand this comment. If you picture a company with a few 100MM dollars in sales per year, that manufactures or retails physical products, without software how many people work in Accounting? Inventory control? Do you have paper order records, that you use to process returns? Switching to electronic systems for these and many other areas has resulted in huge efficiencies of labor (not always to the benefit of employees, I should be clear). Obviously not all change in hardware and software over the last 50 years has been improvement, and certainly some of the difficulty in these areas is due to inefficient policy (either by the business or by government), but claiming that the work should be complete seems to vastly underestimate the complexity of the problems being addressed - whether by software or through more manual solutions.