Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Remember when you thought having a sound play when you got new mail was cool? Remember when you though that little toast that showed up when a contact signed into IM service was cool, or that little toast that Outlook draws when you get new mail? I have turned all that nonsense off, and now for the new tired. Remember when sorting by conversation was cool, and a major improvement over sort by date? You probably don't because you are using either of these in your Inbox right now.
Well I was thinking the same thing when I read this fortune interview of Ray Ozzie and Bil Gates and I smiled for the same reasons the folks at ClearContext did.
This Fortune article has a great interview with Bill Gates and new Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie on how they see email tools evolving. It's not hard to guess why we find Ray Ozzie's comment so intriguing: "Funneling messages in chronological order into an in-box is not necessarily the best model for dealing with different projects, different teams, different issues, while other unrelated things get intermixed with those. You have no sense of the priorities." You're preaching to the choir here, Ray. Read the rest of the article for Bill's explanation on how he manages his email account. Good stuff.
This Fortune article has a great interview with Bill Gates and new Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie on how they see email tools evolving. It's not hard to guess why we find Ray Ozzie's comment so intriguing:
"Funneling messages in chronological order into an in-box is not necessarily the best model for dealing with different projects, different teams, different issues, while other unrelated things get intermixed with those. You have no sense of the priorities."
You're preaching to the choir here, Ray. Read the rest of the article for Bill's explanation on how he manages his email account. Good stuff.
Now I think, imagine if I had to look at my inbox in a manner that was not optimized for what's really important. It's not the attributes of the messages like date and subject that matter. It's how important the people and conversation is to me, and when I need to deal with it.
BTW - I got to meet Ray Ozzie last week and it was one of the highlights of my career at Microsoft. Such an interesting person. I think he will do great things for Microsoft. Very few people can come into the company and have such a great amount of respect from the technical rank and file.