The Good and the Bad in Email
CentralDesktop has published two cracker articles on the good and the bad things about email as a collaboration tool.
It’s so good that I think I might not post anything else tonight. I’ll go and read over the articles and think about them again.
The good in email 
notes that — despite all our complaints — email is still the preferred method of collaboration on the Internet.
The article suggests that this is because email is simple, universal, manageable, searchable, accessible, visible and can be personalised. In short, it “just works”:
It’s chaotic and overwhelming, but it works most of the time and there is no learning curve. A new employee can sit down at their new desk and they can immediately start sending and receiving messages, participating in email thread conversations, stay apprised of events and even delegate tasks; all without having to learn, navigate or configure a new interface. And, if that person wants to retrieve information from previous projects or historical data all they really need to do is open and search their Gmail or Yahoo account which they were probably forwarding most of their email to anyways.
The bad in email notes that — despite all our praise of it as collaboration tool — email is deeply flawed.
The data in people’s inboxes is “silo’ed”, stored in invisible, unsearchable mailboxes where collaborators can’t collaborate with it. That’s the worst thing about email:
What I mean by silo’ed is that email traps information into personalized, unsharable, unsearchable vacuums where no one else can access it - the Email Inbox…. For many folks, the Email Inbox contains their most intimate secrets all mashed together into a single location: business correspondences, contracts, proposals, reminders, tasks, love letters, indiscreet online purchases, dirty jokes, pictures of your spouse (and kids), time-wasting games, inappropriate messages from co-workers and friends and lets not forget spam. I think its obvious that silo’ed data is devastating to team productivity. The snowballing effects of silo’ed data can debilitate even the strongest of project managers.
Email is also bad because it perpetuates “walled gardens”, is not secure and is not permissions-based (i.e. no scalable participation), because group emailing is complicated and difficult and because it just simply makes us lazy.
There is some stuff at the end of the second post about how important it is that we all move to the kind of collaboration tools that CentralDesktop makes, but that’s not the only conclusion one could draw from these thoughtful pieces.
Tags: collaboration, email, ProductivityRelated posts
May 4th, 2006 at 7:55 am
I would have to agree with the general conslusions reached. Email can be good, but it’s overwhelming as pointed out, and massively unorganizable since 90% of what happens in email could be just as easily and effectively communicated via IM instead.
Collaboratively speaking, it’s certainly the case that wiki as rough as it can be is still a better overall solution for easy fast collaborative documentatoin and idea creation.
Of course, there’s always… *shudder* sharepoint.
May 4th, 2006 at 8:23 am
Also, I think the these problems in the bad post are what services like Backpack and Joyent’s Email Connector are designed to work around.
Because I work mostly alone I can’t test or experience how well they work though.
May 4th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
HawkWings,
Thanks for the props. I love having my articles called “cracker.” I had a great laugh! I’m also glad I was able to help you with your blog post last night.
I’d love to tell the world that “Central Desktop is the answer” and the solution to the problems that email presents us….but its just not true. CD solves some of the collaboration problems, as does Joyent, Backpack, Jotspot, Socialtext, Basecamp, ad infinitum. The space is wide…and the game is endurance.
I’m glad smallerdemon sudders when mentioning the word ’sharepoint.’
I enjoyed writing those articles as much as others have enjoyed flaming me and praising me. Thanks for reading.
May 4th, 2006 at 8:45 pm
@Isaac: A pleasure. They were interesting articles.