Of course, you cannot play well with others but that is the whole point. I do not need to very often, and, when I do, basic methods work well.

If however, you are part of a team in a corporate environment, then I think he has a point. Islands of information, walled gardens, laziness and the illusion of collaboration are real practical problems in a team-based environment. But the answer is quite easy: get a decent work flow package, or see if a wiki will do the trick.

Still on the Internet, but moving away from e-mail, it has not been an entirely encouraging few weeks for those of us who think that telcos are absolutely the last people we want deciding what can and cannot go across the Internet - and how fast it should go.

To recap this issue quickly: I pay a telco for a 512kb link to the Internet, Google pays another telco for a link to the Internet so that it can provide me with services. The telcos think that this is not good enough, and that Google should be paying them -- again -- for the privilege of using their pipes.

Naturally Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are unhappy at the prospect of their clients being shunted off to slower pipes, if they do not cough up some kind of premium service protection money to the likes of AT&T, but so far their lobbying efforts have failed.