Tim Howell’s Weblog

Microsoft Outlook is much maligned in the technical community, with critics lamenting its occasional lack of robustness and its variable performance.

The undeniable fact is that most information workers use Outlook. The product is installed on 350 million desktops worldwide, and represents a fertile market for third parties who can take advantages of its weaknesses to add value. Where there’s weakness, there’s always opportunity.

In the past few days, there have been a couple of developments that have really added to my Outlook experience:

• Xobni has been made available to a broader beta community. With all the recent discussion about the “social graph,:” Xobni (which is “inbox” spelt backwards) acknowledges that there is a significant amount of this data contained within email: the people you send email to are often those with whom you have a close relationship, more so than many “friends” you may attract in Facebook or elsewhere. Xobni makes it easy to make the most of these relationships, analysing the messages to pull out contact information, email messages and documents relating to an email address/contact. Very nicely done, without a performance hit.
• NewsGator also announced its entire range of RSS readers are free. I used NewsGator’s Outlook reader years ago when there were few options around. For a period I also used FeedDemon, but gave up because it was sometimes less than stable. Now these clients are both free and updated. And, as an aside, this is a fantastic strategic move by NewsGator who can use their client products to drive interest and use of their enterprise RSS offerings.

Lastly, I’d be remiss to not mention the Outlook support we provide at ActionThis. We’ve supported Outlook 2007 since launch, and quietly released our Outlook 2003 client at the end of 2007. If you’re looking for a service to help you get more things done, that works the way you do, then look at our free trial.

Busy times here, but will hopefully get back to blogging more regularly in the near future. I had to find time to follow up an earlier rant, where I commented on the number of unsolicited calls we were receiving.

In the intervening period, these calls haven’t stopped, but one pleasing development is the launch of a Do Not Call Register in Australia. The Daily Telegraph noted that the system suffered during its first few hours, but if anything, this shows there’s a great demand.

Given we’re so privacy conscious here in New Zealand, I wonder if this will trigger anything similar here?

There has been lots of discussion and debate around our need for faster broadband, better network infrastructure and a more open and competitive market (not to mention who should make the required investments).

Many proponents are arguing that by having faster broadband, we New Zealanders will have improved access to overseas markets and be able to access, market and sell ourselves and our products to the world. 

Surely this is only one benefit of improved infrastructure?

Why not take a broader view, looking at what else would be possible by having a more robust and better performing network infrastructure. Such infrastructure is an enabler for more than online applications and services.

Quoting Paul Budde:

“These commentators are missing the point – that the need for new infrastructure has little to do with high-speed Internet access – that the major usage of this new infrastructure will be to deliver healthcare services such as video monitoring of patients at home, remote healthcare for aged people, education services, smart energy meters, allowing home owners to monitor and better manage their energy usages, e-government services and so on.

A mindshift is necessary in relation to the use of this infrastructure. It should be looked at from a social welfare and economic benefit viewpoint, rather than the present discussion about how fast our Internet access or video downloads need to be.”

These arguments don’t contradict what’s being sought by many people; rather, they provide further justification for what’s being discussed.

Not really technology related, although there are parallels. The New York Times recently had a great article bemoaning how modern society was suffering an “epidemic of diagnoses.” Or, in other words, despite the fact Americans are living longer - as are we here in New Zealand - more of us are being told we are sick:

Most of us experience physical or emotional sensations we don’t like, and in the past, this was considered a part of life. Increasingly, however, such sensations are considered symptoms of disease. Everyday experiences like insomnia, sadness, twitchy legs and impaired sex drive now become diagnoses: sleep disorder, depression, restless leg syndrome and sexual dysfunction.

Perhaps most worrisome is the medicalization of childhood. If children cough after exercising, they have asthma; if they have trouble reading, they are dyslexic; if they are unhappy, they are depressed; and if they alternate between unhappiness and liveliness, they have bipolar disorder. While these diagnoses may benefit the few with severe symptoms, one has to wonder about the effect on the many whose symptoms are mild, intermittent or transient.

And the parallels for the technology industry? We’re all told, especially in the Web 2.0 era of Web 2.0, that there are solutions out there, but are they really solving the problems we need to solve?