A Curmudgeonly Look At Google Wave 197
rsmiller510 writes "For those of you who think Google Wave is all that and a bag of chips, I put on the brakes and give you a few questions to ponder."
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A Curmudgeonly Look At Google Wave
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Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein
First Wave (Score:5, Funny)
First Wave
Please repost your article. (Score:4, Informative)
Please repost your article on a site that doesn't use Vibrant's rollover advertising technology.
Given that Daniweb not only uses Vibrant's abusive rollovers but doesn't allow you to disable them without signing up, I'm going to blackhole their site in my DNS until they change that absurd policy.
Re:Please repost your article. (Score:5, Informative)
NoScript [noscript.net].
Noscript/adblock doesn't solve the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
That's no different than saying "spam isn't a problem, my spam filters get almost all of it".
And I'm sure that's a few antisocial psychopaths who will immediately pop up and say "yeh, spam isn't a problem", well, I say arseholes to the lot of you.
Re:Noscript/adblock doesn't solve the problem (Score:5, Funny)
Is that all it takes these days to hit the antisocial psychopath arsehole level? Man, all this work for nothing.
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(warning, offtopic coming, mod appropriately)
Spam may not be a problem to me, but it is a general problem. Likewise, those ads are. Allow me to elaborate.
I don't get to see spam. My spamfilter is set well, it works great, it catches 99% of the trash. All peachy. But the problem of spam isn't just that I might get to see and have to delete it. The problem is that spam is one vector of infection for malware. People with less restrictive spamfilters (who usually are also less computer savvy) get to see it, mig
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That's no different than saying "spam isn't a problem, my spam filters get almost all of it".
Actually, it's very different. When a jerk sends spam, they suck up resources within the network, where it must be transmitted, and on the servers and clients, where it must be stored and filtered.
Annoying popups and rollovers, on the other hand, may never be downloaded at all (thanks to NoScript), meaning no waste, other than the extra bit of javascript that's downloaded but never executed. And even if the conten
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Geeze FF with adblock and some half decent filters.
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Firefox with the proper extensions just makes the web better.
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Firefox with the proper extensions just makes the web better.
No it doesn't. The web is still just as bad as it was, you're just not seeing the badness. And, as argued upthread, adblockers have the potential to make the web worse because it makes site take even more extreme measures to shove ads in your face, and it removes the punishment of people not visiting the bad sites because of the badness. You're actually rewarding sites that put intrusive crap up.
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My solution:
1) Click on printable view
2) Immediately copy/paste into notepad
3) ???
4) Profit!
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Block all access to intellitxt.com and your problem goes away.
Rebuttle (Score:5, Insightful)
* What happens when you have conversation with more than say five people.
It becomes harder to manage, just like an IRC, IM or real-life conversation with more than 5 people. It gets noisy, confusing and you will probably miss quite a bit. Wave isn't magic, it will have limitations just like anything else does. Or perhaps I am wrong and it will have tools to manage this, either way it's a non-point.
* Key Stroke by Key Stroke View Could Be Annoying
Could be useful too. Turn it off if you don't like it. Another non-point.
* Editing Ability Could Get Out of Control
There is a history bar. Presumably there will be a history tab/page. What exactly do you want from Wave? Something that allow the entire playerbase of WoW to interact in a single document or something to allow collaberation between 1-20 people working on a FOSS project, or in a business?
* Too Complicated for the Masses
Email is too complicated for the masses. The Internet is too complicated for the masses. The ones that picked up email and internet will pick up Wave, if they have to.
Essentially, this "look at Wave" made me remember this comic [penny-arcade.com] (the bottom one).
Re:Rebuttle (Score:5, Insightful)
It becomes harder to manage, just like an IRC, IM or real-life conversation with more than 5 people. It gets noisy, confusing and you will probably miss quite a bit. Wave isn't magic, it will have limitations just like anything else does. Or perhaps I am wrong and it will have tools to manage this, either way it's a non-point.
It's non-point also because he criticized the default, reference implementation interface. No one said this the only possible way you can look at waves. I can imagine an interface which is much more stripped down, maybe even by disallowing some features of the protocol to keep it simple.
Since the main point is the protocol I expect several different GUIs developed for it, each with a slightly different philosophy. The most important thing is the protocol right now. A good interface is not here yet, and it will surely require several trial and errors until someone finally gets it right.
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Re:Rebuttle (Score:4, Insightful)
The author states he only watched 20 out of the 80 minute presentation. Thus his whole post ends up being a bunch of pointless nitpicking.
But at least the article does follow the There-Can-Be-Only-One mantra of Slashdotism. This will, after all, replace all email, IM, mailing lists, forums, documents, etc. You will not be able to do anything else once Wave launches later this year.
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Check the video on youtube of the Google Wave demo at Google IO conference, they show several reference implementations including one that is CLI.
Is that the same demo as the one at wave.google.com [google.com]? Because that one had one reference implementation, another server that used a copy of that with cosmetic changes, and one complete re-implementation as an ascii interface. I don't think that last one was a reference implementation (although I'm not sure), and while it was plain ascii, it didn't look like a cli either. Not everything ascii is cli, you know.
Anyway, the existence of various implementations, and the fact that you can operate your own wave ser
Re:Rebuttle (Score:4, Insightful)
I can imagine an interface which is much more stripped down, maybe even by disallowing some features of the protocol to keep it simple.
Absolutely. If the author had actually watched the entire demo (rather than just the first 40 minutes), he would have seen that developers are free to design their own GUI implementations. (The demo showed a text-based, stripped down version.) And, of course, the other thing to remember is that Wave is currently a developer preview (alpha? pre-alpha?). There is a lot left to do/create/work on.
I agree with the GP post...this article addresses issues that aren't really issues.
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I'm using an interface like that right now, as I... well, as I type this reply!
Re:Rebuttle (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole "see every character typed" amuses me massively. The very first time I ever did anything like IRC or IM was way back in the eighties, when I chatted with friends using Apple ][+ software and 300 baud modems. The software was too primitive to do it line-by-line. I found it interesting because more of a person's personality came through. It seemed more like text coming from real human beings when you could see them back-space, and the characters came through in a non-regular fashion.
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It also reminded me of the old UNIX "talk" app that I used quite a bit in college.
Last year I had the opportunity to use some chat applications for work and I definitely noticed this concept coming up as a problem while trying to get across complicated or lengthy concepts. Many of us self implemented a workaround of entering sentence fragments with "..." between them rather than full sentences because the silent wait was too long otherwise. It was especially important when you want to reply to someone else
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Anyone who has ever used *NIX ntalk [wikipedia.org] will know that it's as silly and distracting as all hell to see something being typed out in real time, and even more so when your interlocutor is eating pizza.
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* Key Stroke by Key Stroke View Could Be Annoying
Could be useful too. Turn it off if you don't like it. Another non-point.
Reading this point, I wondered what the guy does in meetings. You know, the real world kind of meetings, where a bunch of people are sitting in a room together, talking. Because, you see, when you speak in a meeting, the other attendees hear each word in real time. There is no backspace key.
The only potentially good point he made was at the very end, which is basically that nobody's really looking for an alternative to IM/email.
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What? Speak English please.
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Do you mean that they are paying you so it is their time to waste?
-b
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Uh, Slashdot hasn't gone wave yet... If you're trying out that context based - auto correcting - spell checker from the demo... It isn't working here.
(there, they're, their)
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They mentioned that in the Google IO demo. There's a check box to turn it off, but they admit that the functionality hasn't been implemented yet. They knew that it didn't work; they admited that it didn't work; they released it as a developer preview with it not working.
*sigh* It will be working before the actual release. If it isn't, then you can complain.
Too integrated (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems every company seeks the holy grail of integrated software. One interface to do everything and time and again the general public ignores these "advances" (anyone remember GEOS?)
Why? Let's look at the latest massively successful "product", Twitter. Summary of twitter: Send 140 Characters to the world. Wow. Stunningly complex (from the user's perspective), huh?
What made Google so successful was doing one thing and doing it well. Wave holds 0 interest for me (disclaimer: neither does twitter but at least I get it). Another integrated communication method to take all my avenues of communication and point it to one. Oof. Sorry. If there is one thing we have too much of these days is communications. At least having to use separate programs or channels slows it down just a little. Who wants more mail, more IMs or more anything?
-Joe
Re:Too integrated (Score:5, Insightful)
Wave holds 0 interest for me
I'm not all that interested in the latest Porsche. Is that because Porsches are bad cars or because I'm not in the target audience?
If there is one thing we have too much of these days is communications. At least having to use separate programs or channels slows it down just a little.
I agree, we use computers too often as well, at least downgrading the RAM from 2GB to 256MB slows it down just a little. And the Internet, gosh darn how I hate it, at least I can cripple it by downloading ad/spyware.
Who wants more mail, more IMs or more anything?
I don't want more, I want the same amount in the same unified program.
What made Google so successful was doing one thing and doing it well.
Geese, I wouldn't want "What did Google do right" for the million dollar question.
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No offense, but there's only one product in that list that actually turns a profit. If those were all separate businesses, all but one would be bankrupt.
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Slashdotters all seem to think that advertising is Google's only source of revenue, and I think that's what GP was getting at. In actuality, they also sell their search engine (Google Search Appliance), Gmail & Docs (corporate licensing as well as self-hosted versions), and their hosting (Google App Engine). Those are just a few off the top of my head. I'm sure there's much more that they sell that I'm not aware of.
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Probably because, realistically speaking, it is. Non-advertising revenue makes up a tiny fraction of Google's overall earnings. Their most recent quarterly SEC filing [sec.gov] makes this plain: "Advertising revenues made up 97% [of our revenues] for the three months ended March 31, 2009." All the other stuff (like selling search appliances, GDocs licensing, and the like) is the other 3%.
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Geese, I wouldn't want "What did Google do right" for the million dollar question.
Geese? Google is raising birds, too? No surprise I guess.
b
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Google is raising birds, too?
For several years now [google.com].
Re:Too integrated (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, give all your sensitive business documents to google. sounds like a good idea to me. : \ *sarcasm*
If I started my own business, I'd standardise on Google Apps in a heartbeat. Businesses outsource all sorts of things that require trust.
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Google Wave is an XMPP (Jabber) [wikipedia.org] extension. Like XMPP, servers choose which other servers to federate [wikipedia.org] with. Also, communications will only touch servers which the wave's participants are connected to. Therefore, it is perfectly possible for a company to run its own Wave server(s) and keep internal communications within their control while allowing external communications through the same server.
In short, unlike someone using a Google account is invited to a wave or it is made public, Google can't see it.
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No, you'd set up your own Wave server, in the same fashion that companies set up their own mail servers. Your content doesn't need to touch Google's servers at all. (or indeed, anybody else's server)
It seems AC hasn't watched the demo. "*sarcasm*"
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The nice thing about Wave is that it doesn't need to have widespread adoption to be useful right now. For example, as soon as Google's service goes live, development teams (open source or otherwise) could use Wave to manage their documentation. The collaborative editing functionality makes it very wiki like, which is already good for documentation. And the discussions could allow developer to hash out questions of how to make the d
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You make some good points, but don't forget the other lesson of the dot-com boom - even an unoriginal, unremarkable, unsustainable, stupid, worthless idea can make you a shitload of money if you embrace it early and don't get too greedy to get out before it explodes.
40 minutes (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does everyone keep saying to watch the first 40 minutes. The most exciting part and rarely mentioned in articles comes at the end. They plan to make the entire protocol and the majority of their implementations open source so that anybody can install their own wave servers. Thus it can be a full replacement for email as you can have your own corporate wave server independent from google with all the features and people on your system can send out a wave to someone on google system just as they can with corporate email.
Re:40 minutes (Score:5, Funny)
Come on - 40 minutes attention span for the twitter folk is already impressive ;-)
Re:40 minutes (Score:5, Funny)
Come on - 40 minutes attention span for the twitter folk is already impressive ;-)
I'm surprised they got past the first 20-odd words, and didn't give up at the first "@" symbol.
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What's so special at the end?
"They plan to make the entire protocol and the majority of their implementations open source so that anybody can install their own wave servers." - They say this at the very beginning, even before they start demoing the product.
So far I've only seen the first 15 minutes (had to go to work)
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Yea I know but it kinda bounces of the viewer without much notice. At the end they show using several servers one text based even, and how waves stay on your independent server unless you add a different servers user to it then its shared between the servers though I'm still not 100% sure of all the multi server implementation details, its still pretty interesting.
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How about the robot that does automatic runtime translation of the document into a language you understand. They showed one person writing in English and have the bot translate the document (chat) to French in runtime for a peson who was not that fluent in English. And then it translated back, when the other person replied.
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Yeah, if you can't even be bothered to watch one presentation, I really don't think you've got a right to review it.
What about spam? (Score:5, Insightful)
What I am really concerned about is SPAM.
Real time bayesian filtering? Not really. And that's the most common solution.
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Spammers will go back to the traditional approaches fairly quickly.
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If you send SPAM the message is transmitted to the remote server (your server gets a copy of the content), but in the video they specifically said that a person in a 2nd company excluded from a sub-conversation would never be able to access the content... which I took to mean that the content sits on the originators server, and maybe cached on the remote server if accessed.
This is really different then the current challenge of SPAM. If you're invited to a Wave, the spammers need to have a quasi-permanent W
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From what I saw of the presentation, I don't know if spam would even be an issue. It looks like individuals need to be invited to a wave before they can ever post to it. (Of course, if you're talking about wave invites, then, yes...that would need to be solved.)
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Only in certain models - the blogger and twitter plugins were clearly adding users to the 'wave' dynamically without requiring authentication.
Also if one of the machines in your domain gets compromised every single wave that that person is a member of could be trashed in a matter of minutes.. it sounds like it really wouldn't be hard to write a bit of code to do that.
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Worse - with Wave *entire conversations* will be converted to chinese link spam, because it lets anyone edit anyone elses posts - it has the same high maintenence problems that wikis have, where you have to go through every day and revert all the spam to keep it active.
If they convert blogger to this (which I expect they will at some point) I'll give it 24 hours before there's no an unmodified posts on it.
Bandwidth and Hosting (Score:5, Interesting)
The concerns I noticed were more technical than the ones he looked at.
Hosting... Every email/every conversation will need to be stored on some central server, complete with any images and change history. Switching to a central location seems like a step backwards from the distributed system we have already with email.
Bandwidth. Every change, send character by character to whoever happens to have it open. That's a lot of 'real-time' bandwidth for this central location. Both of these would work great in a corporate level with a WAVE server running on the LAN, but when it goes global, those servers will be smokin'
Especially with the concept of wave enabled blogs. If you blog hits DIGG, then the wave server will be sending out your edits to thousands of people simultaneously. I wonder what the datapath is. I'm sure Google/Blogspot has a lot of bandwidth, but when you combine all IM, EMAIL, BLOG traffic along the same pipes to a central location....
I just wonder about the scalability of the hosting solution.
They did say that organizations can start their own WAVE server. Sounds like it works much the same way the Jabber (XMPP?) protocol works. But still, if this catches on, I see a future of new congestion problems.
On the flip side...I was very impressed by the demo...and if this catches on in a big way (and works) it could be a serious redefining of communication on the web.
Re:Bandwidth and Hosting (Score:4, Informative)
Hosting... Every email/every conversation will need to be stored on some central server, complete with any images and change history. Switching to a central location seems like a step backwards from the distributed system we have already with email.
Nope, the wave protocol allows for email like hosting. Its not centralized at all other than the fact that Google will be the most popular wave provider for a long time.
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Hosting... Every email/every conversation will need to be stored on some central server, complete with any images and change history. Switching to a central location seems like a step backwards from the distributed system we have already with email.
I don't see the difference. Right now we use e-mail servers to centrally manage e-mail and they interact with other e-mail servers. Wave works the same way. Jabber works the same way. Wave just consolidates the two and adds some more features in.
Bandwidth. Every change, send character by character to whoever happens to have it open. That's a lot of 'real-time' bandwidth for this central location.
It's not so different from chat servers today. With the move towards video and audio chat, this will be the least of the real time bandwidth issue.
Especially with the concept of wave enabled blogs. If you blog hits DIGG, then the wave server will be sending out your edits to thousands of people simultaneously.
For most blogs this is more like sending it to your grandmother immediately. There are a few really popular blogs, but
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No, unless you're cursed with something like exchange, you can migrate from one provider's email server to another provider's server using a trivial "select all" and one (1) "click and drag" operation. IMAP FTW. Granted, it may take a while, depending upon
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Oh, foo.
I need to mention that it's one click-and-drag operation per IMAP folder, and not per account.
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WTF, Wave protocol will be 100% open, wave server will be near 100% open-sourced.
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So there's something new coming along that might require a beefy server to drive it. I can see the sales guys from {HP,IBM,Sun/Oracle} wiping the dribble off their chins already. Would you like a SAN with that Sir?
It will be useful to know (when its released) what size of server and how much bandwidth Google recommend to support # numbers of users.
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Hosting... Every email/every conversation will need to be stored on some central server, complete with any images and change history. Switching to a central location seems like a step backwards from the distributed system we have already with email.
Well, email is also stored centrally on providers' servers (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) which can talk to each other.
It is the same with wave: anyone can run a wave server and these servers can talk to each other.
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They did say that organizations can start their own WAVE server. Sounds like it works much the same way the Jabber (XMPP?) protocol works. But still, if this catches on, I see a future of new congestion problems.
It is XMPP Extension. http://www.waveprotocol.org/draft-protocol-spec
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The only extra bandwidth from character by character is packet overhead, you're transmitting the individual characters regardless.
For reference it doesn't work 'the same way as the jabber protocol works', IT IS XMPP. They aren't really doing anything new, they aren't the first to make software such as this, and its already been done on top of XMPP.
If you're impressed with the demo, you'd probably also be impressed if you saw an Exchange demo and weren't aware of the fact that you were using Exchange. Dem
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>> Well, single characters are not exactly known to take a lot of bandwidth. Depends on encapsulation I guess..
Have you taken a look at XMPP? Let me give you a hint: it's XML. Is the picture clear enough already? Every character will be wrapped in mark-up that ensures routing delivery, order, and integrity.
Sure, it looks nifty when two or three people are doing it on a demonstration, but I also have concerns of its scalability to a larger user-base.
-dZ.
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Some of that is true, but XML and the XMPP protocol are highly compressible.
XMPP uses a long-lived TCP connection between servers, so the continued exchange of <message from="foo@wavesandbox.com/Wave" to="bar@example.com/Wave"> will compress to substantially fewer bytes on the wire.
The XMPP Foundation has done a lot of work on this, and continues to work on scalability issues; particularly between federated servers. Indeed, XMPP has reached a point where it's a fairly mature, secure and speedy techno
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You could, but that would not resemble "real-time" communication, as they tried to show.
-dZ.
Wave? While they ignore Gmail? (Score:2)
Google Wave is beautiful, innovative and indeed holds great potential, I'd rather have Google get its products and especially Gmail out of beta.
How about improving Google Docs? Zoho's Writer is better and more functional in my opinion.
Back to Gmail: There are a host of features that have little attention, yet they could make the lives of users even better.
Heck....do something about Gmail.
Waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why does slashdot allow people to submit stories about their own blog posts?
Are you familiar with the Firehose? It's just how it works, don't complain about options, etc.. Clearly, someone thought this was interesting enough to get modded up to a level where The Editors noticed it and thought it was worthy (or, in this case, might incite enough bloodshed to become amusing).
...or, with even more cynicism:
1) submit ad-laden story to Slashdot
2) submit kick-back to editors
3) Profit!
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Why does slashdot allow people to submit stories about their own blog posts? It seems like that bypasses an important filter - someone else finding the story and deciding it's important. Clearly, this story wouldn't have made it to slashdot if the author hadn't submitted it, because 90% of it is just nitpicking at minor details of a system that hasn't even been released yet.
I am kind of surprised that the story made it through. But it is not like they have a lot of choice in stories. I posted several stories myself. I later went back and found that they looked like they had been posted by a drunken baboon with a twitch after a night of freebasing. Perhaps you could contribute some yourself and see if you can improve on that.
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Actually, it would be more like the "no self-linking" policy on MetaFilter.
successful apps (Score:2)
always seem to be the ones that only do one small thing really well that everyone suddenly needs and wants. then it bloats and adds new features as it matures. but the app probably won't get mindshare without the initial hyperfocusing of functionality on one really cool must-have
but a collage of preexisting functionality that promises to do "everything"? that actually isn't really sexy or attention grabbing. if i were a google executive, i would leave all the expansive functionality out of the picture, stil
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i think if you asked someone (Score:2)
who switched from myspace to facebook, why they did it, the answer wouldn't be "because it boringly replicates the featureset of what myspace already does"
i'm talking about the sexy hook. the one little must have. yes, facebook does exactly what you say it does, but that's not what made people adopt facebook in the first place. consider the full range of functionality in facebook: 90% of the people who started using facebook did so because of only 1% of that full range functionality. the rest just fell into
inertia (Score:2)
you're talking about what makes sense. i'm talking about what's sexy and makes people flock to something new. if google does what facebook does, but better, nobody won't migrate. simply out of inertia. which of course is a shame, but better products die in the face of worse products all the time, simply because they don't get adapted out of simple human inertia
i'm talking about the hook, the sexy cool thing, what makes users salivate and want to switch to wave. so google really needs to talk up that one lit
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He lost me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally, at the behest of one of my online friends I looked at the first 40 minutes of the 1 hour and 20 minute presentation from last week's Google I/O conference, and I finally had an inkling of the potential.
I tuned out right after the opening where he talks about not even bothering to watch the whole presentation. I can form my own poorly researched opinions.
Still in Beta (Score:2)
You damn kids! (Score:5, Funny)
This guy is like and old man standing on his lawn shaking his fist as the future drives by and lobs a large bowling ball into his mailbox.
I, for one, have always missed keystroke-level chat. That's how it used to work in the old days of dial up BBSes and it WAS more efficient. I didn't have to wait for some slow-typer to finish hunting and pecking before I could start calling them retarded.
Wave is basically a private forum with versioning (Score:2)
Wave is basically a private forum with versioning and file sharing. I don't see how it's much more "conceptually complex" than Slashdot.
"Open" alternative to Groove? (Score:2)
Can anyone who is familiar with both, tell me - Google Wave sounds to me to be awefully similar to Microsoft Office Groove - but more open, so that potentially anyone can use it? Am I far off the mark here? From the descriptions I've seen, it sounds kind of similar to Groove. Only using open, cross-platform, standards-based technologies (HTML, Jabber, etc)?
Same arguments, new technology (Score:2)
While I cant disagree with any particular point in the article, these are the SAME arguments that keep being used by old people (and I consider myself one of them, because I had the same thoughts when I first heard of Google Wave) about any new form of communication.
To many people change data: wikis
Beign overwhelmed by information: email and internet search
Losing the time to self edit: email and IM
To complicated: All of the above
Hell, I bet many of these came up with the invention of the telephone.
No more complex that things already are (Score:3, Insightful)
The article needs to make a better case for why wave is more complicated.
Myself, I find the status quo hugely complicated:
Switching between various native and web applications with different log-ins, hugely different ways of doing things and no easy way to search and aggregate all the information or transition between them.
I don't twitter, facebook, wiki or blog much because of the amount of effort to partipate in all of them and 'context switching' between them. It's simply to complicated.
If wave brings all these different things together under a consistent workflow, that is simplifying things greatly.
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Modded off-topic, sure, but Slashdot is a broken mess. Wish they'd stop trying to be cute with their useless ajax bullshit and just fix their fucking code. An ideal non-broken Slashdot should look and behave like this [imageshack.us].
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If it's such a problem, browse in Low Bandwidth mode with NoScript turned on. Turns into a very nice website indeed with those options.
Re:Can't See Comment Titles (Score:5, Informative)
I know it sucks, I get the same problem; but here's a quick-and-dirty work-around: Click the "Change" button, even without making any changes. The page re-post will cause the titles to magically appear.
-dZ.
Re:Give me THREADED multi-user chat. (Score:5, Informative)
Have you seen the video?
That's what it does. Exactly.
You can split the thread into further sub-threads at any point, and also limit certain threads to a specific group of people.
Yeah and you could distribute different parts (Score:2)
on different servers, so to could scale to everyone on the internet and only the people who subscribed to the bit which was interesting to them would see that bit.
God, I'm too old. I'm going to go take up farming or something.
Re: (Score:2)
Holding a coherent conversation with threads is practically impossible unless you like jumping all over the place.
People do not hold a threaded conversation. They sometimes hold multiple conversations about different threads, but thats an entirely different beast.
We need to stop feeding this bullshit of letting people wonder all over, whereever their minds want, regardless of the focus point or task at hand.
You don't need a threaded chat client, you need to learn to focus.
Re: (Score:2)
However I find too many people take 20 minutes to say something that just takes 10 seconds to read.
So I'd rather they send me an email for that sort of stuff instead.
Then it's their 20 minutes plus my 10 seconds.
Rather than their 20 minutes plus my 20 minutes.
So for "tell me what you want", email is better.
For "Do you want X? If yes do you want Y also? etc" phone or instant messaging (IM) is better.
In fact, IM is superior in
Re: (Score:2)
Do you have a record of that? Do you have a detailed and exact transcript of who said what? Can you search it for keywords? Do you have an exact set of changes each participant proposed to the document we discussed? Can you get the final document will all discussed and accepted changes in 5-10 seconds? Can someone who was not at the meeting later on see what was discussed, who proposed what and why? Can you point it out on a map? Could you translate it to French, Japanese and Russian, in real time?
Google Wa