Why Email Is Still The Most Adopted Collaboration Tool 253
An anonymous reader writes "Isaac Garcia, the founder of a Web 2.0 Collaboration Software company,
writes bluntly about why Email is still the preferred and most adopted collaboration solution around.
'So, why are Collaboration Software Vendors (Central Desktop included), keen on vilifying email and so quick to promise a practical alternative to the chaos of email? And, if the vendor's software is so much better than email, than why do users revert back to email as soon as they hit a snag in the system? Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?'"
Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
At least that's my two cents.
And it's less restrictive (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, no integration needed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Plus, no integration needed (Score:3, Informative)
For short emails it works incredibly well, but if I want 10 people to get the latest version of a document, it's just not good enough. For that you just have to use a decent version-control/synchronisation system; the only problem is that they are viewed as too complex to use.
Fortunately, free software like Tortoise(SVN) [tigris.org] are making it easier to use for even non-technical people.
Re:And it's less restrictive (Score:3, Insightful)
So true. I get pissed when people try to communicate with me via phone. Its easier now because I have a cell that is always on me (and it works), but phone tag is obnoxious.
I never ha
Re:And it's less restrictive (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, and yes. And they also got up out of their cubicles and talked with other people. Email can be a waste of time too, spending lots of time crafting a perfect message when a quick phone call can accomplish the same thing.
Re:And it's less restrictive (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's what they invented IM and SMS for...
Seriously, though, I didn't understand the point in the article where he was like "everyone knows email is broken." Really? Who is everybody? Everybody I know uses email pretty well, thanks.
While I like the idea of collaborative software, it kind of reminds me of group living situations, where someone is eating other peo
Re:And it's less restrictive (Score:3, Insightful)
I would guess that the only thing "broken" about email is the fact that there is SPAM and viruses. I have a filter for that and the couple mails a week that escapes I either call the people and tell them to stop sending me mail or I just delete it if its foreign or just one of those mails that is unreadable and gibberis
Re:And it's less restrictive (Score:3, Funny)
Meeting Bookings (Score:2)
I was about to comment on the situation of them ignoring established appointments when setting up meetings, but then I realized that that's still a bit of a double-edged sword. I've had situations where people have ignored the fact that I already have an appointment listed for the time slot th
Re:And it's less restrictive (Score:2)
Re:And it's less restrictive (Score:4, Insightful)
The bottom line is that availability is a BAD thing. It's like money and real estate. The more you have to give away, the more people will want. You need to keep quiet about it, dole it out only to the deserving and only in the amount they need. If people don't know your availability, and have to ask you first, you are in control of where the time goes and how much. I think Louis XIV was the one most famous for this technique of dealing with bureacracy.
As it stands I have to play a cat and mouse game with "tentative" responses (because declines are often sent to managers for negative use on performance reviews) and finding the people who really did have an important meeting and making sure they understand tentative is my code for "a meeting I rejected implicitly", without actually telling them that because I may want to decline them some other day. It sucks up a lot of time, and worse, my cell phone (which I download my calendar too) understands tentative as "booked", so I can't rely on it to tell me what meeting i need to be attending, and when I have time to do real work.
Like most of us, management will not approve overtime, I'm "exempt", but I'm not going to work overtime without pay. There is plenty of work to do for an 8 hour day with 0 meetings. The only solution is to manage time carefully, something made extremely difficult by these sorts of "productivity" tools.
Email works, everyone has it (Score:5, Insightful)
So they can increase their profits by selling businesses software they may not even need.
And, if the vendor's software is so much better than email, than why do users revert back to email as soon as they hit a snag in the system?
Because email works, period.
Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?
Usually, it will just be another application to learn aside from your email and IM, and doesn't provide any greater functionality.
Am I the next master of the obvious?
ubiquitous (Score:3, Insightful)
OMG I agree. (Score:2, Interesting)
Even when working with more than 2 persons, there are lots of email software applilcations that make life really easy to handle them.
THere is also chatting, forums and even Voip (even with video) but they have this "live" requir
Re:Email works, everyone has it (Score:4, Insightful)
This brings us to yet another reason why email is still around; simplicity. All the functionality you need in email already exists. It conveys all the needed information in a simple format and is easily understood. Anything else is just trimmings.
Re:Email works, everyone has it (Score:5, Insightful)
(bolding mine)
All we need to do is to point at this single word.
Re:Email works, everyone has it (Score:2, Interesting)
Since you mentioned electricity (Score:4, Insightful)
The content of a medium is another medium. The content of a web page is a book (sometimes a film) and the content of email is speech. Your pithy, useful, one-liner emails resemble a bit of conversation a lot more than they do a piece of text.
Speech is electric (it was your sig that inspired me to post here). Books are not. Books move very slow and require a committee to "get them right". Speech is autonomous, isolated, demands free action. It's like the difference between cars jammed up on a highway (or content-management) system and people zipping around on their own personal jetpacks.
Re:Email works, everyone has it (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, selling someone a video confrencing suite, or a huge fancy intranet application with built in messaging and project management, will make you a very handy profit.
geee (Score:5, Funny)
Mmmmh... i love the smell of rhetorical questions in the morning...
Email (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Email (Score:5, Insightful)
end result- dust and a DEA note (Score:5, Funny)
Wrapped brick. Wrapped in brown paper; posted in street corner box with same amount of postage as was strapped to unwrapped brick. Extreme weight for size made package seem suspicious. Notice of attempted delivery received, 16 days. Upon pickup at station, our mailing specialist received a plastic bag containing broken and pulverized remnants of brick. Inside was a small piece of paper with a number code on it. Our research indicates that this was some type of US Drug Enforcement Agency release slip. The clerk made our mailing specialist sign a form for receipt.
Re:Email (Score:5, Insightful)
While you're using mailed bricks as a metaphor, I'd put a postage stamp on a brick and mail it if that was what I needed to do for my job. In other words, I do what I need to do to get my job done. Sometimes I have to do it in a way that doesn't make sense from the outside. Believe me, I'm trying to fix that. But in the meantime, I mail the brick because I have to. Everyone can receive the brick I mail them and the postal service has a reasonable service level when it comes to intact delivery of my brick.
Re:Email (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Email (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Email (Score:2)
The email infrastructure can handle it. The problem with the large emails is that the users never clean them out of their inboxes, even though they've saved the attached file to their local drive.
Users seem to understand the fact that their disk dri
Re:Email (Score:3, Interesting)
With the current structure of email, thare's no simple way of discarding the attachment and keeping the mail body.
You can of course paste the said text to a new mail and send it to yourself but then you lose some metadata. Or you can edit the mail spool or whatever... I've always seen this as a design flaw of the cur
Re:Email (Score:3, Informative)
Admittedly, it took a long time and a lot of screaming (and votes) for it to happen, but the Mozilla guys finally got it.
Re:Email (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Email (Score:2)
Re:Email (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Email (Score:2)
Right. And it's not like Windows makes server use any easier.
Let's say our plucky secretary is told by IT that there are servers available for transferring large files. She is shown how to map a server to a drive, and she can simply drag and drop in Explorer. This is great, she thinks.
Now she finishes that 100MB PowerPoint presentation wi
Re:Email (dealing with large attachments) (Score:3, Interesting)
No argument to either the point that email is not the right way to send large files, or the fact that getting users to do it any other way is not likely to occur on any wide-scale.
Personally, I think the best solution is for the outbound email servers (SMTP) to identify and remove large attachments, replacing them with a URL to obtain t
Re:Email (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Email (Score:2)
Too late, buddy.
Re:Email (Score:2)
Re:Email (Score:2)
Re:Email (Score:5, Funny)
What a moron! Why didn't he just ask the recipient to setup an FTP server in the DMZ, configure FTP over SSH, set him up a user account and give him the IP and relevant login information so he could just FTP it? Sheesh, when will these users ever learn?
Re:Email (Score:3, Funny)
Clearly a Ruby on Rails based AJAX solution with realtime GUI synergy is what's required here.
Email != File distribution (Score:2)
The problem in this case isn't collaboration, it's the sharing of large files needed in the collaboration.
In this case, a simple repository is all that's needed to take care of this problem. Have a large file? Open the repository site, drop in the file, it returns a link to you when it's uploaded. There are commercial document repositories [irisecom.com], and there are Open Source repositories [freshmeat.net], either of which solves the problem of putting documents in a central place for groups to utilize.
The real problem for Coll
Why I'd refuse to adopt collaboration software (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it is simple (Score:4, Interesting)
You cannot get any easier than email. The collaboration software, you have to understand it and it requires more effort. However, if you just want to get something done quickly people are going to just go straight to email.
Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, that can be summed up in a single word, "proprietary".
Steve: Gee, lets add Bob from company X into this discussion since they will be doing the design for the double ended latex parts.
Bob: Sure, I use iCollaborate - Black Turtleneck Edition V3.0.7
Steve: Looks like that won't work with our MS proprietary Subscribe and Collaborate With Those Who Also Subscribe V8.1.1 Security Edition.
IT Longhair: Well, you could all switch to Open Featureless Collaborate With Clunky Interface V 0.0.2.
Steve and Bob: Get bent.
Steve: Bob, go to the iSuite
Bob: No, you go to Subscribe.
IT Longhair: Your computers will never run right again, trust me, but you will never be able to prove it is me. Ph33r the admin.
So ends the tale of proprietary bullshit. Every vendor must foster ths because the funding, patent, and legal system is broken. Until it is changed, nothing will change.
The only question left is why people keep wondering why incompatible, proprietary and patent laden crap doesn't take off, even if it truly is the better way.
-Charlie
P.S. I personally think it all sucks regardless, but that is just my opinion.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I think the reason people fall back onto e-mail is: TRANSPARENCY. The information and the "communications protocol" are both in-band. Whereas, for a proprietary collaboration tool, my experience has been that the communications protocol tends to be out-of-band. Thus, when (not "if") something goes wrong, the means to identify and work-aroud the problem is hidden inside some "c
Re:Why? (Score:2)
-Charlie
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
Egroupware and Kolab are full featured and extremely mature, run on open standards and do not force you to change clients in order to collaborate.
But, keep repeating the same nonsense on the hope that it sticks.
Lack of training (Score:4, Insightful)
Jolyon
Re:Lack of training (Score:2)
Train me all you want... (Score:2)
Why? (Score:4, Funny)
three reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
1. It's ubiquitous. Everyone has it, and everyone uses it. You never run into any snag because your mother doesn't use the same collaboration tool (for planning your dad's 60th birthday) as your company uses (for planning the company president's 60th birthday).
2. It fails gracefully. Everybody knows email isn't perfect, and that the user's actions have a large inpact on it, so you always plan around the fact that people are forgetful, misplace things, delete stuff without meaning to and so on. You send reminders, ask for real confirmation replies (not automated calendar updates), keep a look at the general email banter for signs of misunderstandings and so on. If an email is misplaced, it will probably get caught or planned around.
3. It has an obvious mental model. An email is a note. You pass it to people, make copies of it, forward it, delete it. There is no complex internal state to the system to (mis)understand. All functional complexity lies with the users - and we're extraordinary good at understanding that particular complex system, and indeed find it joyful to do so.
Psychological? (Score:4, Interesting)
With e-mail it's also easier to have a personal copy of correspondence in your outbox whereas other solutions are going to leave you with it scattered across lots of systems, websites and whatnot.
many reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
But you have to look at the problems and the possible solution. And finally you have to conform to the least common denominator. And more often than not, that's EMail.
Look at your task, look at the problems, look at the shortcomings your environment has and you'll find that EMails are for many problems the only solution that fixes ALL your problems. Not as good as many other options, but at least they work.
Scenario: You have 5 people. Distributed over the world. One of them traveling all the time and the only access to the net he has is his cell. This alone puts many coop-tools out of the ability to serve as the underlying structure. A few more are culled when you look at the quirks of his cell (find two brands that work the same way...). Then have some strict guidelines that keep you from installing "unapproved" software (and knowing how long it takes 'til you get approval, you know that you won't be able to keep any deadline if you wanted to use the soft), so you could only use coop tools that don't inject themselves into your system so you can be SURE it won't interfere with other software you're using, squat, another bunch of coop tools leave the pool.
And after you're done, you're sitting there with EMail again as the only viable option. So far, that's what I've been experiencing. Maybe someone will develop a tool that is as omnipresent and easy to use and integrate as EMail, and he will definitly take the market. But so far, no such thing.
Least common denominator (Score:2)
I agree, E-mail rules because it is works the same way on a PDA, MobilePhone, Windows/OS.X/Linux computer and it is a simple and robust system. If you, using a Microsoft solution want to collaborate with contractor X who uses an Oracle solution and contractor Y who uses Lotus notes or something else you are will be stuck with E-Mail being the
Andromeda Spaceways uses email (Score:2)
Maybe it models how we really get things done? (Score:3)
Collaboration software seems to me more like a committee meeting. Good for getting a team of people touching the same base, but not good for actual accomplishement.
Why eMail? That's Easy... (Score:3, Informative)
Email is everywhere, it has a low overhead, it's quick and it's simple. Most of all though you don't need to know anything about the tool you are using - it's like talking to someone.
Most of these types of tools I have tried force you to do more than is required to get the job done such as cataloguing each message. Sometimes that type of functionality is useful but most of the time it just gets in the way.
Echoes of TFA (Score:5, Interesting)
While Email is an excellent collaboration medium in a lot of ways, it still suffers from a bit of the lag that snail mail always did. Admittedly the lag time is down to hours or even minutes rather than days, but you're still faced with the need to cover a lot of ground in your letters, hoping to cover all possible avenues of conversation. *grin* And there's still a hefty amount of people in offices out there who will duly print out and file a copy of your email asking if they're available for lunch.
So while Email remains an extremely useful tool, I think most people are moving on to some form of IM or another, for the sake of speed and immediacy. True, everyone has a proprietary solution to the situation of IM, but I think there are enough aggregating clients out there like Gaim and Trillian that offer most of the functionality (you know, like chatting through the software rather than trying to share photo albums and the like) that people are finding common ground. Now if only they could learn how to spell...
Re:Echoes of TFA (Score:3, Funny)
Uhm. Hours? The last time I had to wait hours for my email was back in 1997. Perhaps you should retire that MicroVAX and get some modern hardware for your mail server?
Re:Echoes of TFA (Score:2)
We have also horrible time lags on our corporate Lotus Notes system, but I suspect it is because the administrators know f*ck about their systems.
Re:Echoes of TFA (Score:2)
As I've got busier over the years, I've become bi-modal in my communications media - mostly email for exchanging information, and then (but more rarely) the phone or (better) face-to-face for interactive discussion when I really need an answer now, or when I know the discussion is too difficult for email.
Even with email, I've now turned off all mail alerting after twenty years of using various descendants of biff. Just too many alerts to pay attention to. B
Email is dead, long live email, thank god (Score:2)
Blah blah blah.
Email works because, well, it works. As someone else said here, its an obvious psychological model.
Embrace it. Stop doing stupid size and
Re:Email is dead, long live email, thank god (Score:2)
We tried that.
The mail server crawled to a screeching halt the first time someone sent a 200MB file to 15 people. Disk storage is far from the only bottleneck - you've also got to account for network bandwidth. Just because it left the factory in a box marked "server" does not mean there's any magic which makes its network card faste
Re: (Score:2)
Simple really (Score:5, Insightful)
Being a medium and not an application means that different applications can be built upon it. This is sometimes good (automated project management notifications), sometimes indifferent (your sister-in-law who forward every joke she hears to everyone she's ever met) and sometimes bad (sapam).
Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Because with most tools you spend more time 'collaborating' than you do actually working. You've got to love the PM's that spend so much time in preparation of a project that they miss the delivery date before even getting the programmers to start writing code.
questioned and answered (Score:2)
This question answers all the other questions.
Versatility, not just familiarity. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the author is right that everyone's being familiar with Email helps it, and it's not something that everyone has to learn; likewise with SMTP being the common thread.
But well, I think the reason's a lot simpler. Email is simply more versatile than any number of collaboration tools because it can adapt to any number of tasks, and can be used in any number of ways. And underneath that is a basic design lesson that is most misunderstood. A good tool is one that can be used in a variety of ways, and people will prefer good tools. The problem is that, in the software world "use in a variety of ways" gets misunderstood. Take a flathead screwdriver. "use in a variety of ways" means, in addition to turning screws (its predominant application in many environments), it can open paint cans, punch corks into winebottles, and, eventually, serve as a magnet. To your "office software design committee", "use in a variety of ways" means, in addition to turning screws by being rotated, it can turn screws by pressing a button, or by affixing the screwdriver into an optional clamp attachment and rotating the object with the screw around the driveer. But the minute you apply it to a paint can, it breaks.
The point is, people don't need many ways to do the same thing; they need one tool that can do many things.
So let's return to the office collaboration thingembob: the annoying thing about office software for me is that it makes assumptions about what kind of work I'm going to be doing. And somewhere, that work falls under the rubric "business", and, like the syllabus for an MBA, includes all kinds tidbits and distractions that nobody in the business world ever uses.
The point is: email is not only simple; it can be used in many different ways. In any group, you'll have different levels of computer expertise and different levels of group involvement. Very rarely and in a few fields are the two linked. If you're building software for people to work together, don't focus on "expert users" or giving anyone specific training: make it do as little as possible, as simply as possible. After all, as I tell people repeatedly, it is much more efficient for most people to know how to do a few basic things in relatively inefficient manner, than to learn all the bells-and-whistles of a complex piece of software.
Things that are easy in the IT world, aren't elsewhere. Try setting up a revision control system for editing 14th-century Latin manuscripts.
Been through this (Score:2)
Time shifting (Score:2)
That's what most people are trying to avoid. An email chain allows users to reply as time permits - and even (gasp) to actually think about something for a while before replying.
If something is time critical, use the phone, or call a meeting. If something is not time critical, use an email chain. I don't see any hole in that logic that is filled by any sort of collaborative software.
Email - the friend, and procrastination... (Score:2)
Collaboration systems are often really cool, and are often loaded with lots of features - but at the end of the day, are also often cumbersome (from a work-flow perspective, ironically) and are often proprietary.
(MOST) people are generally procrastinators or are at least I'll-get-it-done-
Next gen email (Score:2)
1) SPAM
2) No guarantee a message is received
3) Sometimes not even a notification if a message doesn't get through
4) Not secure
email is one area where OSS could really innovate, because a open standards, non-proprietry solution could take off if it was better than existing email.
Why can't this happen (for example):
When I click on send, the email app checks to see if the recipient is online. If they are, it sends the message via secure, direct P2P. It marks the message as having been received. If
Re:Next gen email (Score:2)
Why? A lot of other P2P software does it successfully.
A system like Skype, for instance, works and has been amazingly successful. What is the problem?
Why email works for collaboration (Score:2)
Collaboration software is the OSI model. It's the soup-to-nuts model.
We all know how well the OSI model did.
comfort (Score:2)
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/ [digitalelite.com]
I disagree, email is second at best (Score:2)
Face to face is even better and more efficient, though clearly it has colocation issues.
Re:I disagree, email is second at best (Score:2)
Yawn. (Score:2)
"Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?"
No idea... why don't you ask Wikipedia?
Everything He Said Applies to ICQ (Score:2)
Right article, wrong summary. (Score:2)
Here's the points in the article:
Email is Easy To Understand
Email is Universal
Email is Accessible from Anywhere
Email Can Be Personalized
Email is Manageable/Configurable
Email is Searchable
Email is In Your Face
E
MoonEdit (Score:2)
Business software (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately this is the case, and at the same time the e-mail protocol is simple, proven in time, open and the e-mail clients are used by millions of people world-wide and are simple, therefore reliable.
Network Effect (Score:3, Informative)
The Network Effect [wikipedia.org] is at work.
The value of a network is equal to the power of the number of nodes. SMTP Email has many more nodes than any other collaboration option. In order to eclipse email another collaboration technology must have several orders of magnitude more value per node to overcome the network value added of email.
Why _are_ *other* collab tools around? (Score:2)
Why are there other collab tools in the first place? That's because E-Mail sucks so bad at what it does, there is room for other tools!
Redesign the E-Mail protocoll to something that isn't totally crapped up by a decade of MS Outlook, supports all languages, enforce a single ecryption, request for pass and signature standard, force threading, true metadata seperation (adress based quoting included), thread-based versioning and integrate vcard, ical and XHTML Strict into it a
Why villify email? (Score:2)
This ought to be a lesson to people building collaboration software. Microsoft has a lot of people convinced that calendars and address books are the killer apps for collaboration, but in reality, people are looking to be connected to other people. I may be a little bit biased on this one, though, because I'm involved in a project [citadel.org] that has built a collaborati
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. (Score:4, Interesting)
I develop "collaboration software". Actually it's document management software with collaboration tools built in.
My plan for making the software easier to implement was to make it work with email, not separate from it. Keep It Simple Stupid. Most user already check their email multiple times per day, so why create another "inbox" for them to check? It's more work, more effort and therefore simply it simply won't get done (not to mention all of the belly aching and complaining that would come with it).
It's much easier for a user to get an email that says "Joe Blow wants you to "take out the garbage". Do you wish to [accept] or [reject] this task? If you do not respond within the next [# hours / days] we will assume you reject the task. This task must be completed by [Sunday @ 5pm].
Collab Tools Fail Because They're *ANOTHER* Tool (Score:2)
Interoperability (Score:2, Insightful)
On the other side collaboration suites usually require that everybody uses exactly the same tool. That's maybe acceptable in an small scale environment or in a company but there are no chances that everybody will ever use exactly the same tool in the world at large.
Furthermore, email clients are free or
Because it involves effort. Seriously!! (Score:2)
Collaboration software that can accept inpot in the form of e-mails addre
Don't hate the game hate the player (Score:2)
What annoys me is when people send out email when what they meant to do was put a file on a shared resource, or have a telephone conversation. Just because you've emailed it to somebody doesn't mean that they read it.
Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration softwar (Score:2)
CYA (Score:2)
why email stays succesful (Score:2)
Re:32 billions emails / day?! (Score:2)
Re:32 billions emails / day?! (Score:2)
Re:32 billions emails / day?! (Score:2, Interesting)
AWWW! Ponies! (Score:2)
Ugh, you tell me. I'm sick tired of my friends sending me 2MB pps files with pretty pictures of "AWWW! Ponies!" or cutesy **** like that