Online golf game handicaps productivity
by habits on Aug.26, 2009, under investment
An online golf game is teeing up in offices everywhere. U.S. productivity, meet your new worst enemy.
Whether the economy improves or weakens over the next year is anyone’s guess, but I’d like to make a bold prediction for 2008: by June, white-collar productivity will fall through the floor like a Looney Tunes anvil dropped from a skyscraper.
How can I be so sure? I hesitate here only because I worry about the ethics of doing what I am about to do. In sharing what I know, I could be blamed for the looming meltdown. Would Einstein have published his theory of relativity had he known it would lead to the bomb? Like him, I can’t hold back the inevitable.
Three words then: World Golf Tour.
Where I live, in San Francisco’s Bay Area, someone is always gassing on about the Next New Thing or the Killer App. Increasingly, the Killer Thing they’re buzzing about has to do with gaming.
I’m not talking about the Wii stuff your kids play in the living room. I mean games you play online on your computer. It’s a fast-growing segment of the industry that market research firm Strategy Analytics estimates will generate $5 billion in revenue this year – and more than twice that by 2011. Internet gaming, after all, is what drove Activision into Vivendi’s arms last month, creating one of the largest digital game publishers in the world.
So when a friend sidled up to me and whispered “World Golf Tour” in my ear, I chalked it up to the usual hype. I mean, digital golf games are as old as Moses and about as much fun. But then I checked it out one afternoon. Days later I stumbled away from my computer to eat and, if there was time, bathe.
I’m not going to give you the web address. Anyone who wants it can Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) those three magic words and enter at his own risk. The game is still only a demo; in its current state, you play nine holes of a closest-to-the-pin competition. But when the full site goes live, sometime in the next six months, you’ll have access to all 18 holes of the famous Ocean Course at the Kiawah Island Golf Resort. A half-dozen real courses will be online by year-end. That’s when business life as we know it grinds to a halt.
