Push Button Paradise

I see a headline that reads "Gates: 'Information overload' is overblown". Elsewhere I see, in an apparently personal email to CNET's Ina Fried:

But the software challenges that lie ahead are less about getting access to the information people need, and more about making sense of the information they have--giving them the ability to focus, prioritize and apply their expertise, visualize and understand key data, and reduce the amount of time they spend dealing with the complexity of an information-rich environment.

If you are stuck searching for a needle in a haystack, is the problem that there's so much hay? Or is the problem that even if you succeed, all you've found is one lousy needle? No matter how you label it, Information Overload is a problem.

Nothing another proprietary software upgrade won't solve, I'm sure. Other than that, Gates's message is kind of flip-floppy (and therefore kind of hard to disagree with beyond name-calling). Later in the same email:

For example, "information overload" is becoming a serious drag on productivity--the typical information worker in North America gets 10 times as much e-mail as in 1997, and that number continues to increase. A recent study showed that 56 percent of workers are overwhelmed by multiple simultaneous projects and interrupted too often; one-third say that multi-tasking and distractions are keeping them from stepping back to process and reflect on the work they're doing. In the United Kingdom, it's estimated that stress accounts for nearly one-third of absenteeism and sick leave.

Which doesn't sound overblown at all. Up to and including software like Office 11, the current version as I write this, computer software is still terrible at the most basic information management tasks. For example, on the Brainstorm page, I asked "You are at your computer. A friend calls with a phone number you need to record permanently. How do you record it?" (By the way, please visit that page and add your own ideas. I'll publish the results here.) The first two results both involve using a PDA, and one even has a paper step! So leading-edge, wiki-using people, in front of their own computers, still feel the need to reach over to a handheld device or a paper scrap to record basic, everyday information. That's software failure, friends.

What we need is not more of the same, nor an upgrade treadmill. There is still room in the world for a truly innovative piece of software, but it has several strict requirements:

• It must be cross platform--it has to work for everybody

• It must store data in a format that doesn't lock in users--stored data should be readable 20 years from now with no special tools

• It must be amazingly easy to use

Getting a grip on your personal information is the necessary first step before one can come to terms with organized access to all the rest of the information in the world, but that's for another essay.

These principles are fairly incompatible with commercial software, so I'm thinking it's up to the open source crowd to implement a solution. -m

Update: In a possibly-related piece of news, NetManage, the owners of the nifty Ecco Pro are in the process of open-sourcing the application under the GPL.

posted at: 19:13 | under: 2005-05 | 0 comment(s)