Could you function without email? I hate spam as much as anyone but it takes me only a very small porton of my time and attention to delete it – I don’t even have to open 95% of it to know what it is and that I don’t want/need to see it. And I don’t even use a filter because I keep hearing from people who lose mail they do want or need inadvertently.
I can’t imagine running this site – communicating with the writers, readers, the business aspects – without email. It would force me back to the phone, which is vastly more expensive than virtually free email. In fact I am certain competition from email has helped drive down the cost of using the phone over the last ten years or so.
But this British company owner doesn’t see it that way:
- We’ve all had those days when the relentless pace of communication had us secretly wishing that someone would come and extricate E-mail from our lives. British mobile phone retailer Phones4U has acted on that fantasy by banning the use of E-mail for internal communications among its 2,500 employees.
The company’s owner, John Cauldwell, was quoted in numerous U.K. publications as saying that E-mail had become an insidious productivity drain. He estimated that banning internal E-mail communication would save employees as much as three hours a day and that the company would save 1 million pounds a month. The move, he said, was having an immediate and dramatic impact.
….Dave Anderson, CEO of E-mail-management vendor Sendmail Inc., took special note of reports that indicate Cauldwell isn’t an E-mail user himself. Not only does that show that he might not understand the implications of his actions, Anderson says, but it also brings into question his motives for making such a drastic move. Joked Anderson, “Do I go to the dictionary and look up ‘Luddite’ or ‘publicity stunt’?” [TechWeb]
Maybe the guy just really likes phones.