The walled gardens on your desktop

09.05.2006
What is wrong with e-mail? Plenty of things according to a Central Desktop blog that I read the other day. It is 'siloed' (explanation below), it promotes islands of information, it is insecure, it is not a document manager, it is easy to misuse and it makes us lazy.

There are a few technical inaccuracies in the piece -- actually there are a lot: secure options have been available for SMPTP, POP and IMAP for a while now; it is straightforward to use digital signatures and encryption if you need to; and e-mail is not prone to viruses (e-mail clients are) -- but I do not want to split too many hairs.

What interested me was the silo part. What is a silo? From the horse's mouth: 'What I mean by siloed is that e-mail traps information into personalized, unsharable, unsearchable vacuums, where no one else can access it -- the e-mail inbox.

'Think of your e-mail inbox as a heavily fortified walled garden. Not mentioning the difficulties many have accessing their e-mail inbox outside the corporate firewall, the e-mail inbox contains a hodgepodge of business, personal and private information that most people do not want to share with others.'

Now I love my e-mail inbox for all the reasons he does not: it is a silo which means that I know that everything I need is in there and no-one else can get to it; it is a useful island of information; it is secure enough for me; if it is not a document manager then it comes really close to looking like one; and being lazy is good.

The problem you see is not with e-mail itself -- it is with who you are and how you work. If you are a lazy perfectionist control freak who does not work well with others, and is useless at delegating (like me), the e-mail inbox is the perfect silo-based document manager -- with just enough built-in imperfection so that you can get things done when you need to.