Lighten Up: It’s Only Email!

At the risk of seeming like someone who has completely wasted his life on frivolity, I've written up a few thoughts on the Mimecast blog about whether email is really as important as we sometimes think.
(Archived in 2026 at https://guppylake.com/mimecast-blogs/LightenUp.html)

The Internet is turning you into a High-Tech Lab Rat

Well, you know it's true! This is once again cross-posted from my work blog:

http://blog.mimecast.com/2011/01/the-internet-is-turning-you-into-a-high-tech-lab-rat
The Mimecast blog is gone, and I'm not sure but I think this is the same article as I've archived in 2026 as https://guppylake.com/mimecast-blogs/EmailMakesUsStupid.txt)

Seven things I didn't post here

It turns out, now that I look at it, that it's rather hard to go to the Mimecast blog and just find my posts.  (In fact, it may be impossible.)  So from now on I'm going to try to remember to post pointers here whenever I blog there.

I believe my 2011 predictions post was my 8th on the Mimecast blog, so for anyone who's interested, here are the other seven:

Richard Stallman's Cloudy Vision
(Archived in 2026 at https://guppylake.com/mimecast-blogs/StallmanCloudy.txt)

More Eggs, More Baskets: The Importance of Diversity in Email Management
(Archived in 2026 at https://guppylake.com/mimecast-blogs/morebaskets.html)

A Short History of Email's Future
(Archived in 2026 at https://guppylake.com/mimecast-blogs/HistoryEmailFuture.txt)

Wikileaks Lessons for CEOs: Information Security Management is there to Protect, Not to Ignore
(Archived in 2026 at https://guppylake.com/mimecast-blogs/wikileaks.txt)

Watching from the Sidelines: MessageLabs vs. SORBS
(Archived in 2026 at https://guppylake.com/mimecast-blogs/DefendingTheCompetition.txt)

The Long Wave Goodbye
(Archived in 2026 at https://guppylake.com/mimecast-blogs/LongWaveGoodbye.html)

Is the Pendulum Winding Down? (Archived in 2026 at https://guppylake.com/mimecast-blogs/NotAPendulum.html)

Predictions for the Technology Industry in 2011

I haven't been posting much here, in large part because my blogging energies have been going into my work blog at Mimecast.  But I just posted something my non-email-geek readers might also enjoy, a tongue-in-cheek look at the year to come:

    http://blog.mimecast.com/2010/12/predictions-for-the-technology-industry-in-2011

I could crosspost more of my Mimecast blog posts if anyone thinks they'd like that....

UPDATE:  Mimecast's blogs are gone, but a draft of this piece is at:

    https://guppylake.com/mimecast-blogs/2011-predictions.txt 

My 3 or 4 picks for the Hall of Fame

Yesterday's big news, as I'm sure you know, was the publication of the 2011 list of post-1972 candidates to be considered (by the Veterans Committee) for induction into the baseball Hall of Fame.

The Veterans Committee evaluates candidates who failed to win "popular" election (by baseball writers) during their initial period of eligibility (15 years for players).  This means that the players on the VC ballot aren't usually once-in-a-generation superstars like Willie Mays or Tom Seaver.  Thus it's not surprising that 4 of the 12 candidates are on the list primarily for non-playing achievements.

If there's a no-brainer on the list, it has to be Marvin Miller.  By unionizing baseball and creating free agency, he raised the average ballplayer's annual income from that of a journeyman plumber to that of a half dozen neurosurgeons.  He completely outwitted the owners every step of the way, and would have made them look like fools even if they hadn't already done it to themselves.  Not surprisingly, he made some major enemies along the way, which is the only thing that could keep him out of the Hall.

The Veterans Committee this year is 8 players, 4 executives, and 4 media.  The threshold for election is 75%, which means that the executives would need only one more vote to blackball Miller.  The easiest way to do this would be to buy the vote of one of the media representatives.  I can't imagine how any of the players could vote against Miller.

Next, I'm going to surprise some of you by saying I'd vote for George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin -- together, because neither of them would have gotten in without the other.  It's a tragic love story of two men who hate but need each other -- perhaps now that they're both gone, someone can make a real tearjerker of a homoerotic movie about them.  Baseball needs characters like these.

And that's it.  I wouldn't vote for any of the other 9.  Tommy John was a fine pitcher, but few would remember his name if it hadn't been repurposed, as in the "Tommy John surgery" that has saved countless arms.  You don't get into the Hall for being a guinea pig.  Lou Gehrig is there because of what he did *before* he got Lou Gehrig's disease.  (By contrast, there was a Bush league long before two of its members became US presidents.)

Pat Gillick is a cipher to me, and my reluctance to vote for him may simply reflect that, like most fans, I don't have enough insight into what baseball executives really do.  I see no signal achievements that advertise his greatness -- but possibly I'm punishing him for being so much saner than Steinbrenner.

The remaining 7 candidates -- Vida Blue, Dave Concepcion, Steve Garvey, Ron Guidry, Al Oliver, Ted Simmons, and Rusty Staub -- were all very, very good players.  They all had moments of greatness, and several -- Garvey especially -- excelled over extended periods of time.  But none of them, it seems to me, amassed either the statistics or the legend and anecdotes that put you in the Hall of Fame. 

Moreover, I think that if you look carefully, you'll find that their most passionate advocates are also fierce supporters of the teams they played for.  Reds fans can be forgiven for having no doubt that Concepcion belongs in the Hall, and the same goes for Dodgers, Yankees, Pirates, and Expos fans.  (Are there any Expos fans?)  And as a long time Mets fan, I'd love to see Rusty Staub become the second Hall of Famer wearing a Mets hat.  (Triva answer:  Tom Seaver.)   I'd love to see myself crowned Mr. Universe, too, but that doesn't mean I deserve it.

I'd like to believe that, were I on the Veterans committee, I'd preserve the high standards of the Hall and vote for only 3 of the 12.  But I'm probably kidding myself.  In 1967, my father took me to my first-ever professional baseball game, where my Columbus Jets beat the Syracuse Chiefs 1-0.  Afterwards, I waited patiently in line to get my ticket signed by the young nobody with the winning RBI. 

I'm pretty sure I can hear my father saying, "Hold on to that, he could be in the Hall of Fame some day.  You never know."   I have it still.  Just above my own compulsive annotation, in much larger letters:  Al Oliver.

OK, so I'd probably end up voting for 4 of the 12.  Baseball without maudlin sentiment would be just a more athletic version of chess.  Maybe Al Oliver's career didn't *quite* justify Hall of Fame entry, but to my mind, he missed it by no more than a single autographed ticket stub.

Some parts of the sky might be falling, eventually, or maybe not!

For most of my career, I've tried to live constructively at the interface between computing technology and less technical areas, such as business strategy and public policy.  Mostly this has meant educating the more wonkish folks from the non-technical side, but sometimes I've also spoken out in public.  I'm sure I'll continue to do both, but each time I do, I'm reminded of why most technologists probably avoid this sort of gig.

It's not that such work isn't interesting or rewarding; it often is.  But when I (or, I suspect, almost anyone) try to work simultaneously in two very different domains of knowledge and reasoning, I can't possibly do an expert job in both.  The goal is to do a passable job in both, to enable a few nuggets of information to cross a large gulf in the middle of our society's collective consciousness.

I mention this because I just published an article aimed at CIO/IT-business types, trying to alert them to some changes on the horizon for the Internet.  In my experience most IT directors -- like the general public -- tend to think of the Internet infrastructure as a done deal, a static entity.  And in fact most changes to the Internet tend to happen through growth (new protocols and applications) rather than through changes in the established infrastructure.

But sometimes the infrastructure just has to be changed, and we're about to see a major burst of such changes, so it concerns me that business IT departments are underaware and underinformed.  (Disclaimer: yes, I think the cloud model, of which I am a part, is a smallish part of the solution.)

This is dry stuff.  Getting it down to just a few paragraphs will inevitably involve oversimplification and omission.  Making those few paragraphs get the reader's attention might involve a few more.  The end result, therefore, is that what I describe is almost a caricature of what I expect to happen.   In this case, yes, I expect these things to happen, but no, I don't expect them to pop off like a string of  firecrackers, with no long tail on their deployments.  But I believe that the closer I come to making it sound like the sky is falling, the more likely my intended audience is to get my message.  Getting this kind of message across without being alarmist is not easy.

Anyway, here is the article if you want to read it.  Does it cross the line into overhype unbecoming a scientist?

E-mail's Past, Present, and Future

Recently, the Enterprise Systems Journal was kind enough to ask me some questions about the evolution of e-mail.  Since that was something I'd been meaning to blog about, I'll be lazy and  include a pointer here:

             ESJ Interview with Nathaniel Borenstein

It's pretty much the first time I've set down any of my retrospective thoughts about MIME, all these years later, but I don't think it will be the last.  Are there any MIME-related questions that you would like me to try to answer?