I do hope he's lying or misinformed by his colleagues, because otherwise what we have is a company with a tens-of-millions-of-dollars business that doesn't understand what its customers do with its products and apparently hasn't taken the elementary steps that might enable it to find the answer.
How likely is it that acquiring this information will be cost effective? Why do you think that?
The mental back-of-envelope calculation went something like this:
11B paperclips per year sold in the US, most made in the US; Officemate are one of the two dominant US paperclip vendors; let's say 3B/year. They sell for "about a penny" each, so let's say $30M in revenue; I don't know what margins are like in the paperclip business, but let's say $3M/year in gross profit. Usage and sales of paperclips probably aren't all that unstable from year to year; let's use a horizon of 5 years and say that there's $15M of profit at stake here. A 1% improvem...
Nice article about paperclip industry, I'm sure it will be of considerable interest to many LessWrong readers.