5 Ways Email Makes Your Employees Hate Their Jobs
It can sound like a gentle wave, an eager ding, or perhaps a vibration on our phone felt from a pocket. It’s email, and regardless of how much we talk about the future of work and collaboration, we cannot ignore this blaring reality of all employee lives. Email keeps us handcuffed to our phones and […]
The Origin of Email
I have a surprise for you. The inventor of email did not invent email. Email was actually invented by the Bell System and was in commercial operation long before the Arpanet even existed. This is an interesting story… False The invention of email is widely credited to be Ray Tomlinson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Tomlinson) in 1971. In one especially […]
How to Lose Your Work in Gmail in One Simple Step
I’ve been planning to come back from my “blogging hiatus” (code for writers’ block) with a more substantial piece. After all, my drafts folder is full of half-baked, abandoned posts. But hey, no better incentive to write then frustration! Have you ever seen this error? Yes, I’ve just finished composing email, hit SEND, and thought […]
Ctrl – Alt – Social
In the tech world in which everything is recycled, retooled, and spit out like un-digestible gristle, one often comes across the phrases such as groupware is “dead” or “email is dead.” Oddly enough these are euphemisms or perhaps more correctly the opposite: dysphemisms – the substitution of a disagreeable word…
The Fastest Way to Lose Your $3 Million a Year Job? Have a Zero email Policy
Every time I see an anti-email blog post or even more amusingly a company that issues a zero email policy, I’m always reminded of one of my favorite Einstein lines, “”Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.” You have to admire CEO Thierry Breton of […]
Why Email May Be Draining Your Company’s Productivity
Email. Ah, email. That great productivity drain that we somehow all buy into. I’ve taken to saying, “Email is our personal to-do list that anybody adds to – whether they know us or not.” I was lamenting it tonight when I saw the most brilliant response Tweet by Andrew Hyde “inbox = tetris getting zero […]
How To Fix The Inbox
I’m notorious for the amount of email I receive and the difficulties I have keeping up with it. My best estimate is that I receive about 200-300 emails each day. On those few blessed occasions when I do get my inbox into single or double digits, I feel both enormously productive and focused. (Alas, the […]
Learn From the Gmail Fiasco: You Need Redundant Copies of Your Email–Don’t Worry, It’s Painless :-)
A few hundred thousand (numbers range from 150k to 500K) Gmail and Google Apps users had the scary experience of losing ALL their email content yesterday. Their account was accidentally “reset”. Google acknowledged the error, and issued a statement that they are working on restoring “lost” content. Let’s stop and think here a minute. Is […]
Google’s Disruption Of Enterprise Email Market And Their “Social Challenges”
Ever since Gmail captured the imagination of consumers, Google has been trying to push Google Apps to enterprise customers. In spite of some news about problems in their implementation for big customers, it has been gaining traction steadily. The biggest attraction towards Google Apps Email over other systems is the cost. Even though other players […]
Can We Take Availability Off Cloud Concerns List?
One of the concerns cited by people who believe in traditional ways of computing is the issue of service availability in the public clouds. For reasons known only to psychiatrists, they associate availability to the presence of the software inside their organizational boundaries. If we talk to enterprise users who use email system hosted on-premise, […]
Google Is Trying To Get Exchange Users Through Backdoor
One of the interesting acquisitions by Google, in my point of view, was their 2007 acquisition of Postini. In fact, it was the main driving force behind somewhat successful push of Google Apps into the enterprises. Today, Google is wearing the Postini mask again as it attempts a long term strategy to get more exchange […]
Phone Cameras + Social Are Expanding the Historical Record
“There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.” In a critique of the rise of Instagram (current photo sharing app du jour), Laurie Voss argues that the rise of cheap, low fidelity cameras on phones is undermining the data contained in them. And it’s not just […]
Email’s New Freight – Posting to Social Sites
This post is a test of something I have not yet tried with wordpress.com: posting by email. It’s meant to be mostly an experiment. But it’s also a realization that in a mobile world, email has a new found importance. Delivering social content payloads. In a separate effort, I’m trying to get things done (GTD!) […]
GOutlook. Gmail Back to Earth… in Search of Revenue.
I’ve been long-time Gmail fan, having used it from the very early days, for almost 5 years now. The key reasons why I switched and have stuck with the service ever since were the productivity boosters, first of all: Threaded conversations Labels Search Google did to email what all new product teams should: throw away […]
Should I sell out my friends privacy to win an Ipad?
What is not part of the argument online is that I have almost daily offers to sell out my friends contact information for some cool stuff like the chance to win an Ipad, or other such shiny new toy.
