There have been a number of Newcastle blogs about email recently (Steve Homans, Ian Pitcher, Jane Richards).
Marissa Mayer, former executive at Google (employee number #20) now CEO for Yahoo! has been in the news recently. As part of this coverage I stumbled across this CNN profile from 2006 where she revealed:
“I use an e-mail application called Pine, a Linux-based utility I started using in college.”
People often have very strong opinions about email, due in part because it (sadly) forms a large part of our working lives, and our productivity can be massively influenced by how we choose to interact with it. (Steve Homan’s blog post is very enlightening on this front). People’s opinions about email are very strongly — if not exclusively — determined by their experiences of it, and the email client is a big part of people’s experience. At Newcastle University, the support email client for staff is Microsoft Outlook, and its strengths and weaknesses influence the way we interact via email.
I have noticed, for example, that within Newcastle people tend to shy away from long threads of discussion and “branching” conversations within threads are often met with confusion. Approaches to “quoting” mails you are replying to are inconsistently applied. These are techniques commonly used in environments where high-volume mail is more common. We also rely on moving away from mail towards face-to-face meetings when discussions reach a given point.
Contrast this with other communities: Many open source projects rely nearly-exclusively on email for communication. The Debian operating system is one such project, with 91 mailing lists just for developers (and more for users and other interest groups). The linux kernel is similar, with the linux kernel mailing list attracting up to 450 emails every day.
The University is a big place, and the experiences and needs of people differ widely, from receiving tens to receiving hundreds of mails per day, from mailing internal to the University being the norm (support and administrative teams) to it being the exception (RAs on multi-site research projects).
I’m not writing with the intention of bashing Outlook. It has many strengths and is widely considered the best-of-breed groupware client for enterprises. In fact, when it is not the best tool for the job, ISS do offer staff an alternative way to access their email: the open-standards IMAP protocol. This means a power user can use nearly any email client they like, but they cannot expect to be supported if they hit problems.
Back to Marissa Mayer. Consider the context. This is in 2006: Google had unveiled their market-disrupting “GMail” product to select testers two years earlier, and it is widely known that GMail existed internally for some time before that. Despite this, one of their executives chooses to use an esoteric text-only Linux mail client.
Like Newcastle, Google’s working conditions were flexible enough that Mayer could use the tools that worked for her, in this case pine, rather than the “blessed way”. No doubt she had a similar level of service that we offer: high levels of support for the solutions that meets the needs of the majority, without preventing the minority from tailoring their working environment to suit their needs.
This is a quality that can be applied to just about any service offered, and one I hope will be preserved as part of the Digital Campus programme.