False Applications
In my last posting I discussed personal productivity in some depth, but I never commented in any depth about 2 applications that really shouldn’t exist in their current form, and hopefully wont exist in their current form at some point in the future. They are:
- The browser
email has messed up the productivity of computer users for well over a decade and it really should be fixed. Luckily there is a chance it will be fixed with Unified Communications (see this posting for a discussion of Unified Comms.) We really do need an Interface that caters for the fact that we communicate with others in various ways. We do so via phone, instant message, email, etc. and through collaborative interfaces (such as Webex or DimDim or even Second Life). A sensible application would be one that provided a complete trail of all such communications that could be sorted and grouped by person, project and so on.
We use email to send people files, which would be fine if it were clearly a separate act (rather than just another email) and if such files were managed. Mostly they are not managed (for version) and they are not filed in a general purpose filing system where they could be linked to by multiple applications. I have to maintain file versions manually. It’s not that hard, but it’s not automated and it could be. As an electronic delivery system and document management system, email is a disaster and you have little choice but to live with it, unless you are a big company and can spend on document management.
I use Google’s Gmail as by email back-up system. Every email I receive that is not classified as junk, I auto-forward to Gmail so that I have a complete archive of all files that costs nothing (thanks Google.) This means that I can delete local emails and their attachments with impunity, but I do that only once a year. If I want to keep an attachment I drop it into my file store when I first read the email. All of which is fine, because it works, but why do I have to bother with all this, when it could be automated - and we could add in voice messages and instant messages and all mobile phone traffic.
I could rant a little more about all this, but I think I’ve made my point.
The Browser
This application shouldn’t exist in its current form. Admittedly it’s better than it used to be, when Microsoft won the browser war and let IE atrophy. But it’s not the functionality I’m complaining about here - I salute those who enhance browser products with useful functionality. The problem is that the browser shouldn’t really exist at all in its current form.