The death of e-mail

EVERY FEW WEEKS InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard broadcasts an e-mail suggesting one story or another on spam. Every few weeks I try and make myself as invisible as possible until the thread dies down. Why? I don’t care about spam. Spam will go away — with the death of e-mail.

Spam is by definition unwanted. InfoWorld Test Center Lead Analyst Jon Udell employs just one filter to separate out unwanted e-mail: Any message that doesn’t name Jon in the “To” or “CC” field is shipped to a folder for later perusal. Jon reports this consumes about 97 percent of the offending material.

I don’t filter my e-mail, at least not with the Outlook filter Jon uses. For one, InfoWorld uses Notes. For another, I use a more efficient filter that doesn’t require me to navigate to another folder to find out what I don’t care about. That filter is the “From” line. In a pinch I use the “Subject” line. As a last resort, I forward the mail with an FYI.

I read The New York Times cover to cover every day. More accurately, I skim it, pausing to drill down on a variety of stories: technology, the arts, politics, health, corrections. Although most content (save the occasional obituary photo) is available online, I still prefer the print version because I can consume it more quickly.

I do this because no filter system I can think of will allow the unanticipated nuggets I crave to pass unimpeded. If God is in the details, it’s also in the combinations of things — the chaotic logic of a serendipitous universe. As Adam said to Eve in the Garden of Eden, “Stand back — I don’t know how big this is going to get.”

Ray Ozzie’s Notes was an early attempt to expand e-mail into a collaboration platform. Even as the technology foundered on the shoals of expensive IT bottlenecks and proprietary development tools, the client/server software spread across Europe, Asia, and IBM to reach almost 100 million desktops.

With the explosion of the Internet and the Web, collaboration gained a ubiquitous connected presence and its attendant real-time technologies: instant messaging, peer-to-peer file sharing, and videoconferencing. Lotus moved Notes to the Web with Domino, opening the data store to URL addressability, and Microsoft soon followed with Exchange 2000’s Web Storage System.

Suddenly three data types were available from the same store. Notes had previously merged e-mail and Lotus Organizer’s scheduling and calendaring features. Now Exchange 2000 added Office and other documents to the mix, all accessible via the browser. The long-sought vision of an information router seemed closer.

With Notes essentially cloned and the original Ozzie team resurfaced at Groove Networks, Microsoft shifted its attention to XML Web Services. With Microsoft’s investment in Groove, collaboration R&D is now focused on the intersection of Groove’s decentralized peer-to-peer model and Microsoft’s centralized STS (SharePoint Team Services).

The first fruit of this collaboration is the STS integration kit, which lets a Groove user create a shared space, populate it with an STS connector, and input the URL for the target SharePoint site. The result: a Groove shared space that maintains a private copy of the SharePoint data and synchronizes additions in both directions.

This advances the ball in a roundabout way, capturing Web data for offline usage and allowing collaboration across enterprise domains. But weaknesses abound. Groove’s transceiver offers no simple way of capturing Web data other than e-mailing a document into a space, and pointing at a single copy of data from multiple spaces tramples on the Groove security model.

This violates what Ray Ozzie calls the OHIO principle (Only Handle Information Once.) As Ray points out on his Weblog ( https://www.ozzie.net/blog/stories/2002/08/04/why.html ), “If information must be entered in two places, it won’t be.” And the SharePoint editing tool (aka Internet Explorer) remains a crippled subset of Word, Excel, and Outlook. Excel has already been updated, but we have to wait until Office 11 for real XML support in Word and Outlook.

This is clearly a job for what Windows czar Jim Allchin calls a first-class data object. It’s the legacy of Hailstorm, a people-centric model where the data serves identity rather than the other way around. In a universe where documents are made up of the same underlying DNA (XML), e-mail, Word documents, and Outlook messages share a common data type with extensions appropriate to their unique tasks.

With identity as the base on which business logic is built, access privileges and the location of the data can be offered by the “sender” rather than pushing a message out. Instead of playing the digital equivalent of dodge ball with spam, we can now market our identities and barter degrees of access in return for services, products, or information.

So what’s taking so long? Will XML make it easy for others to embrace and extend Redmond’s crown jewels? On .Net Insecurity Day, Office czar Jeff Raikes suggested that “because of our resources, … the extensiveness of our user base, and the popularity of our products,” Microsoft could afford to make the investment “in the long term.”

But Bill Gates hinted that won’t happen soon, saying that if you went inside Office 11 “you wouldn’t see a SOAP message crossing back and forth. There actually is a belief that in the long run things can be architected that way and there are people in Jeff’s organization pursuing that approach, but there’s nothing — no requirement that forces us to do that in Office 11.”

Meanwhile, I just got an e-mail from Mike Vizard: “We should do something around spam-fighting tools ….” Luckily, there’s no requirement that forces me to reply.