Random yet suprisingly interesting fact! by Jonathan Dower

This seriously impressed and astonished me actually for some reason…
In November 2008, Logitech produced their billionth mouse.
I mean, bloody hell thats a lot…
Have a look here just for logitech’s celebratory stuff… it’s quite interesting actually, with things like mouse ideas that never really made it etc.

But anyway, point is- kind of a testament to a technological world, isn’t it? Astonishing figure – admittedly, a large proportion of those billion will no longer be in circulation at all, possibly decomposing ridiculously slowly in a landfill somewhere (I would hope not though – recycle, people! lol) .

But here’s some other curious facts I found as I got interested in this (all sourced from logitech themselves):
Logitech Mice and the Numbers
 Logitech manufactures 376,000 mice every day
 Logitech manufactures approximately 94 million mice in a year
 It takes 12 weeks for a retail mouse to go from the factory to the store
 A minimum of 23 people contribute to making the Logitech mouse – from the factory to the
store shelf – before it is purchased by a customer
 Logitech mice that go through testing have their mouse buttons clicked 3 to 5 million times

Actually, to save you time I’m just going to copy all the mouse related facts across from a Logitech press release:

The Number One Billion Compared To …
Computers:
 One billion PCs will be in use worldwide by the end of 2008 (Source: Gartner
Research, Press release on June 23, 2008)
 In 2008, one billion people worldwide have access to the Internet (Source:
eMarketer “Worldwide Online Access Report 2008”)
 Estimated that one billion people will have used a version of the Microsoft Windows
OS by the end of 2008 (Source: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the company’s
analyst day on July 26, 2007)
People:
 Combined, the population of the U.S., Japan and Germany equals a little more than
500 million
 The population of China is approximately 1.3 billion
 On average, 6 million people visit the Eiffel Tower each year. By estimates, the Eiffel
Tower will not celebrate one billion visitors for at least another one hundred years.
 No recording artist has come close to selling one billion albums
o The Beatles reached 500 million records sold by the end of 1970 – only half
way there
 The total number of automobiles in the world stands at about 750 million vehicles.
Time:
 About one billion years ago, the first multicellular organisms appeared on Earth
 One billion seconds is about 31.7 years
 One billion hours is roughly 114,000 years
 One billion days is roughly 2.7 million years
 One billion months is roughly 82 million years
Distance:
 One billion mice placed end to end would circle the earth more than three times
 One billion mice could span the length of the Great Wall of China 20 times
 One billion centimeters is about the distance from Chicago to Tokyo
 One billion inches is 15,783 miles (24,140 kilometers)
 One billion kilometers is over six times the distance from the earth to the sun
 If you lined up a billion square acres, they would circle the planet at the equator
more than 1587 times
Finance:
 The possession of one billion dollars would place a person among the world’s
wealthiest individuals
 One billion pennies is $10 million dollars (U.S.)
o If you stacked all of these pennies in a single pile, one atop the other, the
stack would reach nearly one thousand miles high. For comparison, note that
the Space Shuttle typically orbits only 225 miles above the earth’s surface.
 A billion credit cards stacked up would be as high as 120 Mt. Everests or 7,219
Great Pyramids
Weight:
 One billion mice could sink the Titanic, and combined they are three times the
weight of the ill-fated ship
 One billion mice equates to approximately 12 million cubic feet of volume, enough to
fill more than 96 Olympic-size swimming pools
 A billion credit cards combined would weigh the same as 1562 hippopotamuses or
52 blue whales
 It would take approximately 1928 train cars or 3158 shipping cargo containers to
haul one billion mice

Is it just me or did they get a bit off topic there? anyway, there we have it. A billion mice. ‘Course, how long till mice are wiped away and replaced by touch sensitivity, particularly with the development of windows 7’s dual input interface thingymobob. Logitech however remain adamant that the mouse will continue to develop and stay strong – and i would agree. The effort required to use a touch screen all day is signficantly more than that required to use a mouse. As long as mice continue to do more thinks with ease, I expect they are here to stay. For now.