Doug’s World

Phones vs. Email

I’ve spent the last three days in a workshop with dozens of software developers, project managers, and founders/managers/leaders of independent software companies. These people are from around the world, and they’re all very hi-tech — everyone has cell phones, many have Blackberrys or other wireless email devices, etc.

And something just occured to me. I haven’t heard a cell phone ring yet. Not once. They’re all handling email constantly, whenever they have a minute, via Outlook Web Access on the machines we’ve provided for them or their laptops or handheld devices. And there are lots of outgoing phone calls being made during the breaks or out in the halls. But nobody is receiving phone calls, and we haven’t told them to turn off their ringers or anything like that.

This couldn’t be more different from my last job, where managers received cell-phone calls constantly and it was hard to get through a brief conversation or meeting without a cell-phone interruption. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also very hard to get people in that culture to respond to email. Often, I would email somebody a brief question and get no response ever, or a response a few days later, or — if it was something urgent — I’d get a phone call in response to my email.

But as we say in the software biz, that approach doesn’t scale. For example, I’ve been in a classroom the last two hours, and during that time I’ve handled email from people right here in the room (asking for clarification of things the speaker is saying), email to and from others at Microsoft (including people on the road or working from home), and other emails from outside Microsoft. Try doing all of that via cell phone without interrupting the presentation! And of course since it’s all email, there’s a nice paper trail of all this communication, so it’s easy to forward info to others as they need it and easy to search and find specific decisions and see the conversations that led to them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 30th, 2005 at 12:10 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.