The study that came up with these findings was commissioned by a company that makes widescreen monitors so that's a bit weird. But I have a widescreen and I am significantly more productive using it than I was in the past with my tiny 15 inch standard format display.
NEC also make standard monitors, I really don't think they'd give a crap which one you buy. It isn't a study of NEC performance versus Acer or anything, it's just Standard Vs Widescreen and they make both in the same factories so I don't see the bonus.
Perhaps they make more profit on a widescreen than a standard, but if widescreen sales were actually boosted then market competivity would wipe anything like that out. So I really see no possible benefit from biasing the results.
One benefit of a study showing that one monitor configuration is better than another is that it encourages people with the worse configuration to buy new monitors.
Another benefit is an article on the CIO website featuring an illustration of an NEC monitor as an example of widescreen monitors.
...Which is not necessarily a reason to bias results in one direction or another, but it is a reason to emphasize the results enough to be statistically significant and hence reportable.
I can't seem to find a description of what the text or spreadsheet tasks were that were used to evaluate the efficiency of the users. Judging from the screenshots in the PDF linked to the story, though, they significantly involved moving things between two documents or pages.
Granted, it is useful to know the relative efficiency of doing such tasks on different monitor configurations. But, unless this is the only thing all of your employees do all day, it's highly misleading to turn the efficiency improvement into a dollar amount based on percentage of employee salary.
"All three groups were significantly more productive using 24-inch-or-larger widescreen monitors (1920x1200 resolution, or larger) compared to 18-inch displays (1280x1024 resolution), according to the research."
They're not comparing 2 displays with the same real estate (in area or total pixel count). Well of course the larger monitor will make you more productive. I'm still dubious about the benefit of widescreen over standard-format.
Widescreen's popularity has more to do with playing DVDs than with increased productivity.
True, I always choose standard size. I want vertical space much more badly than horizontal, especially for browsing, editing source code and reading PDFs.
At work I have two 20.5" monitors hooked to a laptop. The main one is horizontal, while the other is rotated vertically (NVDIA drivers let you do that). I use the horizontal for everything, while the vertical one is for code and code only.
That's why not all duplicate submissions are bad. Sometimes Submission A is what drives people to seek out and post New and Improved Submission B.
Of course, if news stories would link to the freakin' primary sources, already, instead of acting like it's still 1972 and hypertext hasn't been invented yet, we might not have to dig quite so deeply.
(Of course, half the time the primary sources are proprietary dead-trees publications, so it's not always the fault of the journalists...)
