Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!world.std.com!bzs
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Networks considered harmful
Message-ID: <8912221738.AA09309@world.std.com>
Date: 22 Dec 89 17:38:38 GMT
References: <44942@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 71


As an information services provider (ahem) the first problem that
comes to mind with an e-mail box (similar to a fax box) is that once
you start commercializing like that all the non-profit nets will start
reading you the riot act.

To make this happen the first thing that would be needed would be a
clear policy regarding gatewaying mail into and thru networks like
NSFNET. Some quid pro quo that the community was comfortable with
would be a good place to start discussions. Eventually I'd assume
mutual exchange of mail would be sufficient since that services both
parties, but at first that's going to seem like too small a quid (or
is it a quo?)

The other model, where one just starts hawking such a box is an ok
idea and seems to make sense in the abstract, but I know I wouldn't be
interested and I suspect only a few fortune 500 companies would be,
ATT perhaps. The reason is that such an investment, a grassroots
attempt to build your own private e-mail-box network, would probably
take 5-10 years to be profitable. Faxes started like this but the
service was a little more tangible.

You could hook up two offices with faxes in the beginning and it was
enough to justify the boxes even if there weren't a lot of other faxes
out there to talk to, I suspect e-mail has a higher critical threshold
of utility.

More importantly, if it just hooks up two offices there are a zillion
other choices to do about the same thing as far as a (presumably
conservative and not fascinated with techno-toys) business or
administrative person is concerned. Telephones and those little pink
"while you were out" slips come to mind as do voice mail, fax, random
PC e-mail products, backdoors to research nets etc.

Just like a phone system, the real value is not being able to send a
few words from here to there, it's the security blanket of general
connectivity, knowing that the *next* person you need to speak to is
probably reachable via this medium. That's what I mean by a "critical
threshold of utility", a term I just made up. Perhaps "critical
threshold of perceived utility" would be better.

Another (almost) missing piece in the picture involves exploiting the
real advantages of e-mail over these other mediums, such as being able
to group and save/retrieve threads of conversations. For example, any
of us might be managing a dozen projects (some we might not call
projects, like office supplies, but it's still a separate thread.)

Rather than being blasted (as most of us are) with "You have 34 new
messages" every morning you need something that probably doesn't even
look like e-mail, some tagged message system which can be configured
to reflect the groups you break up your world into (sets of people,
sets of project tags, priorities, etc.)

This is the whole "groupware" thing in a nutshell. I've worked with
some executive consultant types on this kind of thing. They knew
nothing really about e-mail etc (one used MCI Mail) but they did have
some vision of what they think their customers wanted. It came down to
basically what I just described, something to structure
communications, commitments, assignments etc. Just passing more
verbiage about is actually a turn-off to a lot of people, present
company excepted.

E-mail is just a means towards that end, a utility not unlike phones,
but as has been said before (usually credited to Bill Joy), if a new
development doesn't represent an order of magnitude improvement then
it's probably not worth the effort of adapting to it.

        -Barry Shein

Software Tool & Die, Purveyors to the Trade         | bzs@world.std.com
1330 Beacon St, Brookline, MA 02146, (617) 739-0202 | {xylogics,uunet}world!bzs