You may have heard of ambitions like "Inbox Zero" and seen books like Inbox Detox floating around. You may be used to seeing this:
Inbox (627)
You may go to work every other day with a top priority of simply surviving your inbox. A curious state of affairs.
Noise
Business email in particular is full of noise. Customer satisfaction issues, more often than you might think, can be traced to the technically proper but mis-guided over-use of email. For example, picture yourself in a serious email chain with like 23 people included. Often, little breakout discussions from the main thread occur by replying to a subset. Someone might change a subject line, starting a whole new sub-thread. Tracking all this and rolling it back up is time-consuming, not easy to do, and sometimes requires editing inappropriate comments out of sub-threads. So it usually just doesn't happen.
Now, let's assume that one of these sub-threads involved a decision about how to handle a customer requirement. That thread comes to a conclusion and everyone likes the approach, so that's that. But everyone else in the main thread (or other sub-threads) may have their own conclusion or be unaware of the conclusion. Any number of these situations can lead to conflicting messages to customers or conflicting expectations about what will occur next, when it will occur and who will follow-up.
All because of a subject-line change. Should the specific characters used in the subject line really have this much impact? No. As Andy Moir would say, "eh, not so much."
Outlook
Many business use Outlook for their employee email at a certain scale. Many run Windows, the IT guys use Active Directory to manage that, and therefore it fits right in. And then it becomes the primary communication vehicle for the entire company.
Outlook stores things in these cool little .pst files. Some people have actually backed them up once or twice. Some IT guys may auto-back them up for you to the network. But that's not as common as you might think.
If you've used Outlook for a long time and you're a busy person, your .pst files are probably approaching a terabyte in size. This probably means that Outlook takes 3 days to launch, 3 days to shut down and sometimes it fails to shut down correctly as well. It also spins your disk a lot, even though you need to move threads around and handle messages at near warp speed to keep up with the influx of new items.
So you are paying a productivity price for local disk storage of an immense wealth of company IP, historical discussions of note and records of important decisions. And that's very, very risky.
Microsoft has recognized that Outlook has started to become a distributed corporate database. I think advances in the file system and the new search approach are at least a response in part to this phenomena. The big question is whether Outlook Pro (not Express) will start to move more and more towards a communication platform than a 'roid-raging email client. And, for the record, none of my gripes with Outlook are gripes with Microsoft. I think we're forcing Outlook to simply do too much.

These guys turned down a huge buyout from Microsoft. So, clearly they believe in what they are doing. Xobni attempts to improve the utility of Outlook by adding analytics and incorporating other outside channels of communication (like Facebook and Twitter) in to Outlook based on your contact's identity.
I am a huge fan of this tool. It improves the utility of Outlook in important ways for me. But, it does not solve all the other problems I'm trying to outline here. It's an improvement to email, but it's still email.
MOC
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Eventually, people began to notice that they were using email to chat. That was really inefficient. So, projects like Jabber and Microsoft Office Communicator came about to try to provide business-friendly chat. A lot of large companies that run on Active Directory and Outlook use MOC. The result of this trend has been that people now use email and chat programs to chat. And since many of these chat services don't auto-archive conversations, it has the effect of replicating many of the problems of email being used for non-repudiated records of business activity, but without the actual recording. And it's not durable like email such that it's very conducive to asynchronous responses. Also, it has a tendency to drop messages and entire conversations.
What's also insidious, and subtle, is that now people have to think about whether they should email someone or try to chat with them based on things like "status" (very gameable) and what type of conversation they anticipate they might end up having. Additionally, people receiving chat messages often feel like they must answer them, so their productivity decreases. But they feel like they can't turn it off, because people will view them as unresponsive.
So now the problem is in some ways worse.
Enter Google Wave

If you want to take a peek at Wave, Ars Technica has a good rundown, which I won't duplicate here. In short, Wave appears to be an attempt to unify multiple personal and business internet communication mediums in to a new baseline that solves many of the problems I've outlined here today. The question is whether it will live up to the hype. Once I get one of these coveted invites that are selling over $100 on Ebay, I will post some thoughts on the inside. I am interested to see how Wave, as an open protocol, may help facilitate trading partner communication in a supply chain context.







