
Email is not free (2013) - evancaine
https://hbr.org/2013/04/email-is-not-free
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greenyoda
_" These traits were all present in our outlier group. They had an open and
egalitarian office, with no individual offices. Every screen had an array of
windows open — Skype, GChat, Campfire, Dropbox, Yammer, and Google Docs — the
right technology for the right situation._"

Surely none of these alternatives to email is "free" either. The cost of
recovering your focus after being interrupted by any type of communication is
high. At least emails, being asynchronous, can be easily ignored until later
if you're concentrating on something important.

Also, if you use a half dozen different modes of communication, I imagine it
would be hard to look for something that someone sent you last week.

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gcb0
this is pretty much an advertisement for google docs instead of email.

The article paints gdoc over email as the holy grail to fix communication.
Gdoc barely fix document sharing!

There is no concept of groups. Well, there is, but it is broken beyond repair.
Same for search (who would have thought). The default for a new doc is for it
to be private. And people will often make a copy from group A, and share the
copy with group B, so group A doesn't see that this person gave access to
group B. Then this grow exponentially.

Another permission problem is that if you don't have access to edit, you also
can't see history!

All this is made worse by the fact that the URLs are meaningless big hash
strings.

Google docs are only good for a single use-case: if you are producing
documents with several hands. And only while the document is live. After that,
I hope you publish it some place more sane, even if it is copy-pasting into an
email chain.

