Nicholas Carr Proves That Dead Men Do Bleed
Category Administration
Speaking of the email monster, Nicholas Carr's logic takes a twist that doesn't make any sense. Nicholas is discussing the findings from Amherst College which has discovered that 95% of email storage is "holding email attachments rather than the messages themselves."
Those numbers are, of course, astonishingly high. In my case, the numbers are only about 75%. In either case, this is a big problem for several reasons: mail database structures aren't designed to be as highly efficient with attachments as they are with text. In addition, the attachments are usually duplicated and reduplicated as they are stored in the Sent folder and re-sent back-and-forth within the same organization. A 10 M graphic is really using 100 M of SAN storage.
Finally, let's get real. What are all these non-sortable attachments doing in mail? Is there a worse document management system than mail? The only reason that mail is left as a massive repository for attachments is because the mail owner finds it convenient to leave it in mail rather than put it where it belongs.
Real options abound that can increase mail efficiency, and there are some "social networking" tools like Lotus Quickr which integrate with e-mail. Mostly, though, users are going to have to change their work habits from assuming e-mail storage is an information land-fill. Nicholas Carr disagrees.
See, I thought I'd read about some new business model touted in TechCrunch for handling attachments. Nope. Carr's solution is to increase the capacity of e-mail by relying on the miracle of Cloud Computing. Think about having ten or twenty years of e-mail with most of its size being used to hold attachments. Not exactly the gold standard in Getting Things Done, is it.
There's an old joke, about a patient talking to his psychiatrist. The patient is convinced he is dead and the doctor explains that he must be alive. To prove it, the doctor uses a pin to draw a drop of blood from the patient's hand. "I'll be," says the patient, "dead men do bleed!"
Apparently, Nicholas' beliefs are something close to the patient, but it's e-mail which never dies.
Technorati Tags: Nicholas Carr, Lotus Quickr
Speaking of the email monster, Nicholas Carr's logic takes a twist that doesn't make any sense. Nicholas is discussing the findings from Amherst College which has discovered that 95% of email storage is "holding email attachments rather than the messages themselves."
Email has become everyone's personal data warehouse.
Those numbers are, of course, astonishingly high. In my case, the numbers are only about 75%. In either case, this is a big problem for several reasons: mail database structures aren't designed to be as highly efficient with attachments as they are with text. In addition, the attachments are usually duplicated and reduplicated as they are stored in the Sent folder and re-sent back-and-forth within the same organization. A 10 M graphic is really using 100 M of SAN storage.
Finally, let's get real. What are all these non-sortable attachments doing in mail? Is there a worse document management system than mail? The only reason that mail is left as a massive repository for attachments is because the mail owner finds it convenient to leave it in mail rather than put it where it belongs.
Real options abound that can increase mail efficiency, and there are some "social networking" tools like Lotus Quickr which integrate with e-mail. Mostly, though, users are going to have to change their work habits from assuming e-mail storage is an information land-fill. Nicholas Carr disagrees.
See, I thought I'd read about some new business model touted in TechCrunch for handling attachments. Nope. Carr's solution is to increase the capacity of e-mail by relying on the miracle of Cloud Computing. Think about having ten or twenty years of e-mail with most of its size being used to hold attachments. Not exactly the gold standard in Getting Things Done, is it.
There's an old joke, about a patient talking to his psychiatrist. The patient is convinced he is dead and the doctor explains that he must be alive. To prove it, the doctor uses a pin to draw a drop of blood from the patient's hand. "I'll be," says the patient, "dead men do bleed!"
Apparently, Nicholas' beliefs are something close to the patient, but it's e-mail which never dies.
Technorati Tags: Nicholas Carr, Lotus Quickr
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