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Gary N. Boone gboone@cc.gatech.edu
Georgia Tech www.cc.gatech.edu/~gboone
Lost in the E-mail
S. C. Gwynne and John F. Dickerson
Time Magazine, April 21, 1997
Charles Wang, Chairman of Computer Associates International:
"It was a disaster. My managers were getting 200 to 300 E-mails a day
each. People were so enamored of it they weren't talking to each
other. They were hibernating, E-mailing people in the next
cubicle. They were abusing it."
And the volume of traffic is still exploding. In 1994, for example,
776 billion E-mail messages moved through U.S.-based computer
networks. This year that number is expected to more than triple, to
2.6 trillion. By the year 2000, the number will nearly triple again,
to 6.6 trillion. Forty percent of the American workforce uses E-mail.
"It is one of the great innovations of the last 20 years," says Paul
Argenti, a professor of management communications at Dartmouth's Tuck
School.
If E-mail plugs brains together, it suffers from linking the muddled
with the magnificent, banding employees to a crescendoing chatter in
which the number of messages increases as the quality of each
declines--a world where there are 300 E-mails and nothing's on.
"People became so overloaded they didn't use it," says Silicon Valley
consultant Anita Rosen about the E-mail system at
computer-software-maker Oracle, where she worked for years. "Out of
300 E-mails, 80% were CCs. So maybe what you actually need to know are
40 E-mails a day, or an hour's work."
Perhaps Gates has spooted an opportunity here. Microsoft is hoping to
cash in--again--by selling "intelligent agents" that will help sort
all forms of digital clutter, including E-mail.