05.11.10

A Better “Reply All”

Companies only grow when they can contain complexity, and email is the fastest way to produce uncontained complexity. This is because email is built around sending messages from one person to another, or from one group to another; anything in between is an ugly hack.

There’s a good reason most people choose to “Reply All”: all of the recipients of an email have to assume that, until they hear something about it, whatever the email says must be done still must be done. If you’ve ever replied directly to the sender of an email that was sent to ten people, you’ve gotten one of two responses: either ten minutes later you’re “Reply All”‘d on another email that makes yours redundant. At one minute per email times ten recipients, it’s easy to see how a simple task can take an hour or more total—and that’s ignoring the cost of disruptions.

I have a simple solution: “Reply All” should not allow you to compose an email reply; it should send a default answer like “It’s being taken care of.” To recipients who need to know more, you can elaborate; to everyone else, well, it’s being taken care of.

(In the meantime, you can start replying-all with that line. Hopefully it will catch on.)

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| Posted in internet culture | 1 Comment »
05.1.10

Good Bubble, Bad Bubble

In the future, historians will stop using the word “bubble,” because it refers to two opposite phenomena:

• In an equity bubble, investors have limitless optimism about the future. They expect many of the companies they invest in to fail, but believe that the 95th- or 99th-percentile performers will more than make up for this.

• In a credit bubble, investors have limitless faith in the status quo. They expect volatility to decrease, and they believe they can estimate returns with increasing accuracy. If they want higher returns, they know they can use leverage—but for the most part, investors celebrate the middle of the bell curve, and expect the tails to cancel each other out.
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