Email is So Five Minutes Ago
Great article in BusinessWeek on how wikis and IM are solving the email problem.
Soar engineer Jacob Crossman says that's because the wikis eliminate the usual flurry of back-and-forth attachments and resulting document-version confusion that's rife in e-mail. At Dresdner, Rangaswami says that among the earliest and most aggressive adopters, e-mail volume on related projects is down 75%; meeting times have been whacked in half...
Recently, Lennard wanted an analysis of how to double profits on a particular trade. Instead of shooting copies of the same document to several people via an e-mail attachment, only to have to keep track of, merge, and archive all the fixes back into a central version, he threw the problem up on a wiki page where everyone could brainstorm, comment, and edit in real time. In the space of two days, entire e-mail conversations evaporated and Lennard had analytics that would have otherwise taken two weeks. Next year's budget practically wrote itself on the wiki page.
Only one problem with the article, no mention of Socialtext. I guess I should be upset at this, but as long as we keep advancing wikis in general and delivering the above to customers, we keep on leading the market.
