Tech Firms to Fix Monster They Created

Google, Microsoft, Intel, and IBM are partnering are on a new initiative to help workers distracted by emails and instant messages improve their productivity, the New York Times reports. The Information Overload Research Group, a nonprofit launching next month, will devise cultural and technological solutions to reduce the digital deluge that’s costing firms $650 billion a year in productivity.

“There’s a competitive advantage of figuring out how to address this problem,” said one IMB researcher, noting a  “certain amount of irony” in the tech firms' effort to solve a problem they helped create. An Intel engineer added, “People get so addicted to e-mail that they will send an e-mail across an aisle, and that’s not a good thing.” (More email stories.)