Ed Brill writes about Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 issue on Meta-Mail (available for $80). From the report introduction:
Indeed, data is relatively easy, and we have good tools for it: the calculator, the spreadsheet, and the giant financial number-crunching application. The spreadsheet gave users a tool not just to calculate, but to build complex models and, in fact, to do many things that previously could be done only by IT high priests. Better yet, the spreadsheet allowed them to build models that were intelligible to normal people. So-called power users could build the models, while other users could reuse or modify them, plugging in their own data and coefficients. Complementary graphing and other tools made the data more visible and meaningful to ordinary people who could not pick trends out of a sea of numbers. We also have the database, which acts as a back-end to those corporate applications and to the spreadsheets, allowing for easier sharing of data across applications and even among enterprises.
The first successful spreadsheet was called VisiCalc; where is VisiProcess?
This issue highlights some of the tools and applications in which users are finally getting tools to define and control processes for themselves, for teams and even in part for enterprises. Collectively, they will serve to make business processes easier to model and manage.
I bought and read the issue – it is excellent. Quite amazing that even after all the applications in the world, how much we end up doing in email. I have been thinking that in Netcore we need to look at a three-pronged email strategy for enterprises: managing bad mail (we have Emergic CleanMail), managing subscriptions (we have Info Aggregator), and managing good mail (we need solutions here).
