Where did all the productivity benefits go? The answer is probably: to competition. If one company got CRM, wow, huge productivity boost! They would sell so mu

Where did all the productivity benefits go? The answer is probably: to competition. If one company got CRM, wow, huge productivity boost! They would sell so much more per unit of salesperson labor input. But it's a competitive world, so a lot of companies get CRM. The additional sales productivity gets competed back out; perhaps with the recipients of sales efforts (who now have a large increase in the amount of incoming contacts) losing/wasting as much productivity in aggregate as the companies using the software have gained. The same dynamic applies to many other areas. Not to all areas of course; there are also real massive, long term benefits to productivity. Famously it used to take over half of all human effort just to keep us fed. It doesn’t anymore.