Email is not free (2013)

<i>&quot;These traits were all present in our outlier group. They had an open and egalitarian office, with no individual offices. Every screen had an array of windows open — Skype, GChat, Campfire, Dropbox, Yammer, and Google Docs — the right technology for the right situation.</i>&quot;<p>Surely none of these alternatives to email is &quot;free&quot; either. The cost of recovering your focus after being interrupted by any type of communication is high. At least emails, being asynchronous, can be easily ignored until later if you&#x27;re concentrating on something important.<p>Also, if you use a half dozen different modes of communication, I imagine it would be hard to look for something that someone sent you last week.

this is pretty much an advertisement for google docs instead of email.<p>The article paints gdoc over email as the holy grail to fix communication. Gdoc barely fix document sharing!<p>There is no concept of groups. Well, there is, but it is broken beyond repair. Same for search (who would have thought). The default for a new doc is for it to be private. And people will often make a copy from group A, and share the copy with group B, so group A doesn&#x27;t see that this person gave access to group B. Then this grow exponentially.<p>Another permission problem is that if you don&#x27;t have access to edit, you also can&#x27;t see history!<p>All this is made worse by the fact that the URLs are meaningless big hash strings.<p>Google docs are only good for a single use-case: if you are producing documents with several hands. And only while the document is live. After that, I hope you publish it some place more sane, even if it is copy-pasting into an email chain.