When Google tossed up an interactive and playable banner to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man this past weekend, office workers and casual browsers all over spent some time enjoying the blast from the past. It was estimated that 4.8 million man-hours were spent on the game, and $120 million was lost by the lack of productivity.
Still others weren't so amused by the playable game. Some companies had to ban the Google home page for a few days due to policies that prevent games from being played at work. Others also ran into an issue where the sound of the game served as a nuisance, this was later remedied by Google.
According to a study by RescueTime, Pac-Man on Google--the playable version of the iconic game that the search giant replaced its home page logo with on Friday--cost the economy a total of 4,819,352 man-hours and a whopping $120,483,800 in lost productivity. As RescueTime put it, you could hire every single Google employee, including co-founders Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt, and get them for six weeks for that much money.
Still, it's hard to get too worked up over 36 extra seconds of time someone might have spent on Google. After all, how much time does the average person spend not doing work when other time-sucks come along, like presidential elections, sports championships, "Lost" finales, the death of celebrities like Michael Jackson, and so on. Clearly, that number is an average, and so it masks that fact that some people probably lost most of their day Friday to Google's remake of the 30-year-old game.
Still, it's hard to get too worked up over 36 extra seconds of time someone might have spent on Google. After all, how much time does the average person spend not doing work when other time-sucks come along, like presidential elections, sports championships, "Lost" finales, the death of celebrities like Michael Jackson, and so on. Clearly, that number is an average, and so it masks that fact that some people probably lost most of their day Friday to Google's remake of the 30-year-old game.
Still others weren't so amused by the playable game. Some companies had to ban the Google home page for a few days due to policies that prevent games from being played at work. Others also ran into an issue where the sound of the game served as a nuisance, this was later remedied by Google.