Daily Archives: 9 July, 2012
Life’s Too Short for So Much E-Mail – Delay
Just thinking about my e-mail in-box makes me sad.
This month alone, I received over 6,000 e-mails. That doesn’t include spam, notifications or daily deals, either. With all those messages, I have no desire to respond to even a fraction of them. I can just picture my tombstone: Here lies Nick Bilton, who responded to thousands of e-mails a month. May he rest in peace.
It’s not that I’m so popular.
Last year, Royal Pingdom, which monitors Internet usage, said that in 2010, 107 trillion e-mails were sent. A report this year from the Radicati Group, a market research firm, found that in 2011, there were 3.1 billion active e-mail accounts in the world. The report noted that, on average, corporate employees sent and received 105 e-mails a day.
Sure, some of those e-mails are important. But 105 a day?
All of this has led me to believe that something is terribly wrong with e-mail. What’s more, I don’t believe it can be fixed.
I’ve tried everything. Priority mail, filters, more filters, filters within filters, away messages, third-party e-mail tools. None of these supposed solutions work.
Last year, I decided to try to reach In-box Zero, the Zen-like state of a consistently empty in-box. I spent countless hours one evening replying to neglected messages. I woke up the next morning to find that most of my replies had received replies, and so, once again, my in-box was brimming. It all felt like one big practical joke.
Meanwhile, all of this e-mail could be increasing our stress.
A research report issued this year by the University of California, Irvine, found that people who did not look at e-mail regularly at work were less stressed and more productive than others.
Gloria Mark, an informatics professor who studies the effects of e-mail and multitasking in the workplace and is a co-author of the study, said, “One person in our e-mail study told us after: I let the sound of the bell and pop-ups rule my life.”
Ms. Mark says one of the main problems with e-mail is that there isn’t an off switch.
“E-mail is an asynchronous technology, so you don’t need to be on it to receive a message,” she said. “Synchronous technologies, like instant messenger, depend on people being present.”Although some people allow their instant messenger services to save offline messages, most cannot receive messages if they are not logged on. With e-mail, it is different. If you go away, e-mails pile up waiting for your return.
Avoiding new messages is as impossible as trying to play a game of hide-and-seek in an empty New York City studio apartment. There is nowhere to hide.
I recently sent an e-mail to a teenage cousin who responded with a text message. I responded again through e-mail, and this time she answered with Facebook Messenger. She was obviously seeing the e-mails but kept choosing a more concise way to reply. Our conversation moved to Twitter’s direct messages, where it was ended quickly by the 140-character limit.
Later, we talked about the exchanges, and she explained that she saw e-mail as something for “old people.” It’s too slow for her, and the messages too long. Sometimes, she said, as with a Facebook status update, you don’t even need to respond at all.
Since technology hasn’t solved the problem it has created with e-mail, it looks as if some younger people might come up with their own answer — not to use e-mail at all.
So I’m taking a cue from them.
I’ll look at my e-mail as it comes in. Maybe I’ll respond with a text, Google Chat, Twitter or Facebook message. But chances are, as with many messages sent via Facebook or Twitter, I won’t need to respond at all.
BlackBerry’s – Delay Could Lead to Lawsuits
A friendly crowd is unlikely to greet Thorsten Heins on Tuesday, when he makes his first appearance as chief executive at the annual meeting here of Research in Motion.
Shares in the BlackBerry maker have fallen by about 95 percent from their peak in mid-2008. And last month, not only did RIM post a $518 million quarterly loss, but it also surprised investors by announcing that a new line of phones critical to its future would again be delayed.
But the annual meeting may not be the only forum for shareholders to vent their displeasure. Several securities law experts and some investors say the delay in the BlackBerry 10, and overly optimistic remarks as recently as last week by Mr. Heins since he took over the top job in January, may also make RIM the target of shareholder lawsuits.
“They’re going to get sued and they should get sued because I think a closer look at the record is likely to unearth knowing and willful misrepresentation,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, the former president of Apple’s products division and the founder of the software maker Be, who is now a venture capitalist and blogger in Palo Alto, Calif. “When the C.E.O. says there’s nothing wrong with the company as it is, it’s not cautious, it doesn’t make sense.”
After disappointing shareholders in June, Mr. Heins gave a radio interview last week, wrote opinion pieces for two Canadian newspapers and took online questions from visitors to The Globe and Mail’s Web site. As part of a public relations offensive, speaking with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, he forecast a sunny future for Research in Motion by saying, “There’s nothing wrong with the company as it exists right now” and denying that RIM was, as some investors believe, in a death spiral.
In a statement, RIM rejected any suggestion that the company had misled investors. “RIM is well aware of its disclosure obligations under applicable securities laws and is committed to providing a high level of transparency, as evidenced by RIM’s decision to issue an interim business update on May 29, 2012, to alert shareholders that it expected to report an operating loss,” the company said.
While securities laws vary in Canada, where RIM is based, and the United States, where its stock is also traded, companies are generally required to report promptly any developments that may significantly alter their financial state. The BlackBerry 10 delay is unquestionably such a change, Canadian and American law experts said.
Any shareholder class action would also have to show that Mr. Heins or others within RIM knew that a delay was likely or a strong possibility when he was publicly boasting about the product’s progress and promising on-time delivery.
The legal experts said repeated statements earlier this year by Mr. Heins and other senior RIM executives — that the BlackBerry 10 line of phones would arrive in stores as planned by the end of this year — could support this claim.
For example, on May 1, at a conference for app developers in Orlando, Fla., Mr. Heins unveiled an incomplete prototype BlackBerry 10 phone and, along with other RIM employees, demonstrated features of its operating system.
During the presentation, Mr. Heins repeatedly and enthusiastically told the audience that the new product would be out by the end of this year.
“Every day I get questions about the progress on BlackBerry 10,” he said. “I appreciate all of the interest on our next-generation platform and I promise, I promise to you that the whole company is laser-focused on delivering on time and exceeding your expectation.”
He added at another point, “We’re making good progress, and I’m committed to sharing the progress with everyone right up until the launch later this year.”
Similar sentiments were offered at other developer sessions by other RIM executives over the following weeks.
Exactly what changed between the beginning of May and the end of June is unclear. Nor is it apparent when Mr. Heins decided that the delay would be necessary.
During a conference call to discuss the earnings, Mr. Heins said the volume of software that must be handled to integrate all of BlackBerry 10’s components “has proved to be more time-consuming than anticipated.”
Even without the delay, many financial analysts were concerned that the BlackBerry 10 was already too late to market. The delay means that it will be facing off against new and improved phones and operating systems from Apple, Microsoft and Google.
“There’s a high risk of litigation here,” said James D. Cox, a law professor at Duke. “The outcome of the litigation would be hard to predict.”
Richard McLaren, a law professor at the University of Western Ontario, said that in Canada companies are required to immediately disclose major changes in their operations.
“When you’ve used language like ‘laser focused on coming in on time,’ you’ve really raised expectations,” he said.
Professor Cox said RIM might be able to avoid shareholder litigation for another reason: the company is in bad shape. Many lawyers, he said, may be unwilling to embark upon such a case because there is no guarantee that RIM would be around when it was resolved.
Also, untangling share price drops caused by the delay in the BlackBerry 10 from the company’s other problems would be difficult, he said.
Anita Anand, a law professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in investor issues, said that it might be unnecessary to challenge RIM’s disclosure through the courts.
“If there’s a punishment to be had here, it’s already in the making,” she said. “The market speaks before any adjudication body.”
The new phones, which RIM hopes will again make BlackBerrys desirable, were supposed to be on the market by the beginning of this year at the latest. But the company’s former co-chief executives put off that release because, they said, the company needed to perfect the new, more advanced electronics used in the new models.
That delay is already part of one class action against the company. In securities filings, RIM has said that lawsuit is without merit.
Unlike Samsung, Nokia and other competitors that use smartphone operating systems from Google and Microsoft, RIM began creating its own about two years ago. But Mr. Gassée said the effort was already too late.
To jump-start the process, RIM bought QNX Software Systems, which is based here and which has long provided operating systems used in everything from automobiles to nuclear power stations. But Mr. Gassée said that the actual operating system, which essentially parcels out computing tasks and allocates the computer’s resources, was the smallest part of developing BlackBerry 10.
The heavy lifting, he said, came from creating the complex software that enables apps to use the operating system and the phone’s hardware features. He estimated that Apple had spent about four years developing iOS, the operating system for the iPhone, before bringing it to market.
Mr. Heins’s public relations campaign last week to talk up the company’s fortunes was widely seen as being, at best, overly optimistic, but unlikely to create legal headaches for RIM, experts said.
In its statement, RIM said Mr. Heins was trying to outline the changes he had made over the last six months to turn RIM around.
“His optimism stems from the fact that, unlike many commentators or analysts, he has actually seen the progress being made on BlackBerry 10 and is confident in its ability to play a significant role in the future of mobile computing,” the company said.
Jill E. Fisch, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, said the remarks were not surprising, comparing them to the talk of a used-car salesman.
“Everybody expects the chief executive to put an optimistic spin on the company,” she said. “To be fair, we all know that RIM is a struggling company.”
