"Nothing Replaces
Anything"
(You’ve Got (Too
Much) Mail!, Page 2)
By Richard
Dalton
July 12,
1999
About
ten years ago, after a couple of decades spent watching this
industry, I had the temerity to dream up my first and only
law. Dalton's law, as indicated above is: "Nothing replaces
anything". My only corollary is: "Everything is additive".
As the years go by, I keep finding evidence to support
this premise. Most recently, this included the fact that
more than 80 million punch cards were manufactured in 1998
and that the number of cards, after declining for years, has
more or less stabilized at that level.
Right after reading about the enduring need for punch
cards, I spoke at a conference for users of virtual team
technology: audio, video, and document conferencing, and
other state-of-the-art technologies that are used to help
global teams communicate. One of the companies attending the
conference had also been identified as a major user of punch
cards, somewhere deep in an information systems subbasement.
Everything is additive.
Unifying Forces
In short, we're been
communicated into a corner. So how do we go about
rationalizing this flood of communication entities? Enter
the universal inbox, or "unified messaging", if you prefer.
This is a concept that's been kicking around for some
years. Everyone likes the idea -- collecting all kinds of
messages in a single repository and accessing it any way you
want -- it's the execution that is lacking. There are
awesome complexity problems for large organizations that use
multiple systems to corral e-mail, voice mail, and faxes.
That also means high costs to implement and support the
systems that have been offered to an apathetic market by
most major telecom vendors.
More promising are the Web-based systems that target the
home office/telecommuter markets. Recently, Onebox announced a service
that coordinates voice mail, fax, and e-mail. You dial in to
a local number and receive all your various messages. E-mail
is converted with text-to-voice software. Alternately, you
can be notified of incoming traffic by an ICQ
instant message.
That's real progress, but most of us exist in a tangle of
messages segregated into separate clumps ,and that situation
is likely to persist for a while, at least for people tied
to corporate messaging systems.
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