The return of phone tag

Many of us remember when the new fangled fax machine was first called a telecopier and was going to revolutionize office communications. How far we have come since then. But with all the various waves of tech to revolutionize our offices, I think we have almost come full circle back to the lonely telephone.

When email first became a part of my corporate life, many bemoaned the death of the hierarchal organization. The notion, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, went like this: since anyone can email his or her boss, there was a flattening of the corporate structure. We could send memos up the corporate food chain at will, and this took some of the authority from our direct managers as well as the nature of reporting relationships. But there was a benefit: No more phone tag. People sitting next to each other in the same office would rather email each other than pick up the phone. Those that got really good at email would set up email listservs, one-to-many conversations.

One big change in the email era was that the notion of an administrative assistant, or a departmental secretary, became rarer. Workers typed their own reports, and filed their own correspondence in their electronic inboxes. I don’t think I have been in an organization with any secretaries for more than 20 years.

Before email there was this thing first called a telecopier that would take six minutes to send a page of text. That was going to remove the spatial dimension and allow work teams to be located around the world. Well the fax machine did help, but it wasn’t until IM became popular for business use that we could instantly get in touch. Email wasn’t fast enough. And, by the way, even less phone tag, since you can just message someone.

I saw folks IM each other that were sitting three cubes away. Those that got really good at IM would do group chat discussions, many-to-many conversations. Those organizations that got really, really good at IM would hire people anywhere, it didn’t matter where, because they were instantly part of the hive mind. You just needed an enlightened boss who could feel comfortable about managing remote staffers.

But email, fax, and IM seem so last year. Now we are in the social networking era. That extended the notion of who is your colleague, because now you have insight into the social graph of a company. With just a few keystrokes, we can find the resident expert in Middle Eastern business, or who knows how this plastic part is fabricated, or where to go to get this analysis run, or who can help me with fixing my PowerPoint slides. And even less phone tag, since we don’t talk anymore on our phones to anyone. I had a discussion on our text chat line earlier this week where we made fun of PR folks that actually had the nerve to call us. In real time. On the telephone.

But this brings me to my point: we have eliminated so much telephone time that now when someone does dial us (and the verb is still used despite the fact that phones haven’t had dials for some time), it becomes singular and noteworthy.

Well, organizations have become flatter, and certainly some have become more innovative and inclusive in their decision-making. But the hard part is not to be flat, but to be effective, no matter what the structure. Here is the thing: as companies succeed, they need to have more middle managers. As a manager, you can’t have 30 direct reports if you plan on spending time with each one. So you have to set up some structure, no matter whether you use email, Facebook or carrier pigeon. Even our most hyper-communicative companies like Microsoft and Google have lots of middle managers today.

So we have almost come full circle, back to the phone. When it rings it is either a PR person trying to follow up on an earlier email (bad) or someone really important, who wants to jump ahead of my email inbox, my unread Facebook feeds, and my latest tweets. Sigh.

Agree or disagree, you might want to post a comment here.

Facebook, the new AOL

Remember the last time when an Internet site tried to be all things to all people, limit the way that they accessed their content, and tried to make themselves into the default go-to platform for social networking? Yes, Facebook has aspirations to become the new AOL.

This week’s F8 announcements are certainly exciting for Facebook, extending the site into just about every nook and cranny of our lives. But here’s the rub: it could be going too far. Do we want to really be that social? It is ironic that the service is developed by the most anti-social beings on the planet, those nerds that code by night, stay home by day, and whose preferred method of communications is typing, not talking f2f (face to face, if you have to ask).

So would you rather have your social networking as a platform, FaaP as it were, where it is part of the warp and weft of your Internet experience, baked into everything that you do? (Okay, enough metaphors.) For those over-sharers that post 34 status updates each hour, yes, yes, and more yes. But for the rest of us, who want some balance in our lives, the choice is to layer social networking on top of our existing Internet pathways that have been well worn into our computers. This “front end” social networking is what Microsoft and Google and the rest of the vendors are counting on, with Google+ most notably but with hundreds of others from Cisco’s Quad to Salesforce Chatter to IBM’s Connections trying to almost desperately add that social context to their products. Soon, your IT staff will have a social network to share amongst them tips on how to best configure their firewalls, and so forth. (Note to potential investors: I have the term sheet almost finished.)

When I stated using Google+, I noticed that all of my Picasa photo albums were shared with my peeps. Now, many of the photos in there aren’t all that exciting, such as screenshots that I took for many of the articles that I have written. But some of them are personal and private, and I raced around clicking here and there to ensure that they would stay that way. That was an early consequence of over-sharing for me. And there are going to be plenty more as Facebook turns on this new feature and that. They never have been very respectful of my – or your — privacy. And perhaps all these complaints are just sour grapes; I still have fewer friends than my 20-something daughter, and probably always will. (She was and still is one of the Popular Kids. I was and still am a nerd.) But at least now I don’t feel as bad about it.

So the choice is clear: login to Facebook and be more open about your life’s choices. Or get left behind with the non-social Internet and become an online hermit. I want more choices; it shouldn’t have to be as binary as that. It seems like that’s where we are now.

But if enough of us opt out, Facebook could become like AOL in a few years: an overgrown walled garden that no one wants to visit. Instead of a quaint anachronism of people who still use dial-up modems and like using a 90′s-era Webmail service, we’ll have those over-social folks that spend their days with their updates on Farmville.

Live text chat today on storage virtualization

I will be moderating a live text chat at 1pm ET today on behalf of ReadWriteWeb, with guests from NetApp and VMware, to talk about general storage virtualization topics.

Some of the topics we plan to discuss include:

• How do you allocate storage appropriately when you don’t know what your needs are?
• How important is thin provisioning for your storage solution, and where do these features need to be integrated?
• Does your backup solution need to be virtualization-aware?

Feel free to join us by clicking here.

Do We Need A Desktop OS Anymore?

In a word, no. We may be reaching the point where the desktop OS is no longer important, eclipsed by the developments of the browser and ironically a victim of better integration by Microsoft and others.

Photo @ Creative Commons by kerplunk kerplunk

Yet we are all huddling around the news feeds coming out of Build 2011 as we try to figure out what Microsoft is attempting with Windows 8 and Metro. My prediction is that this will become the OS/2 of the modern era: an OS that is so elegant but instantly obsolete by events, designed for the wrong chip (the mobile ARM CPUs) and based on a cellphone design ethos that no one could care less about. Yeah, but it has a great new set of APIs!

It wasn’t all that long ago that Internet Explorer became almost indistinguishable from Windows Explorer. And with the rise of Chromebooks and how much of our time is spent online, the days of the particular desktop OS is almost irrelevant now.

Remember when the desktop OS did things like keep track of directories, protect us from viruses (and Windows still doesn’t really do that all that well), make copies of files to removable media, and handle printing? Who really cares about any of that stuff anymore? Yes, I know I still can’t print my Web pages out with any kind of fidelity. But is that the browser’s fault or my OS?

Now that you can get gigabytes of free file storage in the cloud, do you really care what is on your hard drive? Well, some of us dinosaurs (and I count myself among them) still cling to our hard drives but soon they will be totems from another era, much the way many of you look upon 5 inch floppy disks, or even 8 inch ones if you can recall back that far. Wow, we could carry an entire 360 kB of something around with us! (Of course, we didn’t have mp3s or videos either, but still.) And all this cloud storage is happening as hard drives are getting so cheap that they will be giving them away in cereal boxes soon: a 2 TB drive can be had for less than $50.

Meanwhile, Adobe next week is announcing a slew of features in the next version of Flash (I can’t tell you about them quite yet, sorry). They fully intend Flash to take over the kinds of OS-like services that I mentioned above (ditto on the protect us from malware issue too, at least so far). And Google is trying mightily to rejigger HTML with its Dart Web programming language. And VMware has a new version of its View too, which is probably the OS that I really will end up spending most of my time with going forward. Whatever comes of these efforts, it almost doesn’t matter whether we are running Windows or Mac or Linux. Because we don’t need them anymore for our online lives.

Now stop and look over that last paragraph. Whom have we trusted for the next OS? It isn’t Microsoft, and it isn’t Apple. It is a bunch of folks from the valley that have never built an OS before (well, give Google half credit). Think about that for a moment.

Back at the dawn of the computing era in the 1980s we all wrote dBase apps (and saved them on those darn floppies too). Then we moved up to use Lotus Notes, before the Web took root. Then we branched out in a dozen different directions, using all sorts of programming languages that used HTTP protocols. That was the beginning of the end for the desktop OS.

Now we’ll still have desktops of one sort or another. And yes, Windows isn’t going away, much as Microsoft is determined to pry every last copy of XP from our cold, shaking hands. But when Adobe, Google and VMware gets done with their stuff, it won’t matter what will be running on them.

Remembering 911

With the wall-to-wall 911 coverage this week, I wanted to take a moment to go back in time to that fateful day ten years ago. Back then, I had just released my second book on home networking and was about to embark on a series of book tours to promote it. The tour never happened. I was living on Long Island and that morning I was out on a bike ride to the end of the peninsula that had a view of the Manhattan skyline. I didn’t know that I was seeing the collapse of the buildings from my vantage point 25 miles away. I lost two acquaintances that day; one a fireman that I had done several charity bike rides with, the other on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. It took me months to visit the site, and I posted this entry in March 2002. I thought you might want to read what I had written then:

I went down to the former World Trade Center site this week, for the first time since 9/11. It was a dark and stormy night, with an almost surreal atmosphere of ground fog and occasional rain showers. A utility pipe venting steam into the street nearby added to the almost movie-set-like feeling around the dark and deserted streets.

I have been reluctant to return here, an area that I visited often on business and tourist reasons throughout my tenure as a New Yorker. The twin towers were a favorite destination for my family for showing off the city to out of town guests, as well as a place for me to go to power breakfasts for various computer industry events.

I have been back in the neighborhood several times since the disaster, not as a tourist but as a volunteer to help prepare meals for the construction and police crews working there. And while many friends of mine went to see the site in the days after the disaster, I couldn’t bring myself to go. I didn’t want to see what had happened. After losing one friend, Tom Kelly, I didn’t want to approach the area without some further reflection and respect for all of those who perished. It was enough for me to view the skyline from afar, and note the gap, like some extracted tooth from my child’s smile.

But this week I was ready to see what things looked like, and pay my respects. I had dinner with a friend of mine who lives in Battery Park on a high floor, with huge picture windows facing the site. He and his wife watched the buildings crumble that day, and they offered me to come to their apartment and see the view for myself. Until this week, I wasn’t really ready to take them up on their offer.

But once I got to their place, I was glad I came. The foggy evening highlighted the twin searchlight banks that have been setup as a memorial a few blocks away from where the actual towers were located. Their lights cast an eerie glow around the neighborhood, and from above it seemed like you were looking down onto the tops of the towers themselves — the same square patterns of the buildings external skins have been reproduced in the lights. It is a fitting tribute to the people who lost their lives that day, to the strength and determination of the people of this country, and to two huge buildings that are gone forever.

Ironically, their apartment building stands on the landfill that was removed from the original construction site to build the trade center complex many years ago. The site and nearby streets were all under the Hudson River waterline, and to get down to the actual bedrock to build the site required creating this huge “bathtub” retaining wall to keep the water out. The wall is all that remains of that effort, and it is a massive task to ensure its structural integrity, now that the buildings and vast underground complex have been removed.

From my friends’ apartment, you could see the movement of the construction vehicles as workers continue to excavate the site, and they are still working round the clock. There was just one area left — the area of the compressed south tower. The rest was a big hole, reminiscent of the Tyco crater scene in the movie “2001,” lit up with its own array of lights. Like the movie, we are still searching for answers to why this happened. Instead of an alien life, we have other humans who were so determined to harm thousands of us.

I still have lots of complex feelings about the events around 9/11, and I am still sorting them out — as I am sure, you are too. Looking at the lights, I remembered my friend’s Tom’s contribution, and honor his memory and his fellow firefighters and the many others who didn’t make it that day.