Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

Last week I wrote about the “death” of email which through a chain of events (thanks Joshua) put me in touch with Lars Ploughmann who by coincidence was posting on the same idea at the exact same time. The main difference being his post being much more thorough round-up of arguments around the issue than my quick post. Go read Lars’ discussion here.

In August of this year, I published some thoughts on how effective email is when it is used as the only or main communication tool for a project. The post became part of a discussion on multiple blogs so I shall try to pull the arguments together and provide my inchoate conclusion.

I can also do Lars’ infographic one better, I was meeting with a banking industry executive and colleague of mine last week who had no fewer than 14 thousand accumulated unread (an not spam) messages in his outlook inbox (of an amazing 140 thosand in total, “hey at least I see 90% of my email” he protested). I don’t think this is so uncommon, the enterprise is clearly reaching an oversaturation of email. It’s time to start working on new tools don’t you think?

Happy as a clam this morning, cliche as it sounds working from starbucks, with a steamy mug of caffeine, sun beaming in and banging out powerpoints on a new little friend mr thinkpad.

You may all know me from my long-time relationship with mr tablet but I finally broke down and bought one of those radical machines with a keyboard on it. Unusual deal too, $650 a shiny thinkpad on ebay. Nothing like a cheap-and-chearful yet unbreakable thinkpad. Not the currentest model (X31) but score of a deal 12″ 3.4lb (mmm) 1.7GHz PM, and ATI graphics.

These graphics come with a near comic 16MB of RAM (it’s on-chip is why it’s so slight) but still more than enough to kick around XP or even Vista in classic mode at decent resolutions (I *heart* clasic mode, there’s a post to be made about that subject too, I feel like I owe MSoft a vista post, funny how that works, though I don’t if they’ll like to hear my impressions of Aero).

The catch is, I like MacOS far less, and don’t get me started on linux…. [dons falme suit…]

Apophenia explains (as pointed to by Stephanie Booth today)

“Academics have been noting that young people’s social and emotional energies have been moving from email to IM.

Do young people have email accounts? Yes. Do they login to them semi-regularly? Yes. Do they use it as their primary form of asynchronous communication for talking with their friends? No.”

As usual, the teens are ahead of us. It will be interesting how the trend evolves as IM finally starts to wash across the business world… (in some ways RIM’s are already the business medium of choice for the really important/juicy missives, the school yard gossips of the working world are they not?)

See the same meme from earlier this year: “Teens: Email is for old people” on Ars.