Now electronic mail is becoming the primary tool for exchanging messages. Print conventions have also evolved. If you want a sentence to end with a chuckle to show that its meaning is intended to be humorous, you might add a colon, a dash, and a parenthesis. This composite symbol, :-), if viewed sideways, makes a smiling face. For instance, you might write, “I’m not sure that’s a great idea :-)"—the smiley face showing that your words are good-natured. Using the opposite parenthesis turns the smiling face into a frowning face, :-(, an expression of disappointment. These “emoticons,” which are half cousins of the exclamation point, probably won’t survive the transition of e-mail into a medium that permits audio and video.
Conventionally, businesses share information internally by exchanging paperwork, placing telephone calls, and/or gathering around a conference table or white board. Plenty of time and plenty of expensive face-to-face meetings and presentations are required to reach good decisions this way. The potential for inefficiency is enormous. Companies that continue to rely on these methods exclusively risk losing out to competitors who reach decisions faster while devoting fewer resources, and probably fewer layers of management, to the process.
At Microsoft, because we’re in the technology business, we began using electronic communication early. We installed our first e-mail system in the early 1980s. Even when we had only a dozen employees, it made a difference. It quickly became the principal method of internal communication. E-mail was used in place of paper memos, technology discussions, trip reports, and phone messages. It contributed a lot to the efficiency of our little company. Today, with thousands of employees, it is essential.
E-mail is easy to use. To write and send an electronic message, I click on a large button labeled “Compose.” This brings to the screen a simple form. First, I type the name of the person or people to whom I am addressing the message or choose the name from an electronic address book. I can even indicate that I want the message sent to a group of recipients. For example, because I frequently send messages to key employees working on the Microsoft Office project, in my address list I have an addressee called “Office.” If I choose that entry, the message goes to everyone concerned. When the message is transmitted, my name will appear automatically in the “From” space. Then I type a short heading for the message, so the recipients will have an idea of what it’s about. Then I type the message.
An electronic message is often just a sentence or two with no pleasantries. I might send an electronic message to three or four people, saying nothing more than “Let’s cancel the 11:00 A.M. Monday meeting and use the time individually to prepare for Tuesday’s presentation. Objections?” A reply to my message, in its entirety, might be as succinct as “Fine.”
If this exchange seems terse, keep in mind that the average Microsoft employee receives dozens of electronic messages a day. An e-mail message is like a statement or a question at a meeting—one thought or inquiry in an on-going communication. Microsoft provides e-mail for business purposes, but, like the office telephone, it serves many other purposes, social and personal. For example, hikers can reach all the members of the Microsoft Hiking Club to try to find a ride to the mountain. And certainly a few romances around Microsoft have benefited from e-mail. When my wife, Melinda, and I were first going out, we took advantage of it. For some reason people are less shy about sending e-mail than communicating on the phone or in person. This can be a benefit or a problem, depending on the situation.
I spend several hours a day reading and answering e-mail to and from employees, customers, and partners around the world. Anyone in the company can send me e-mail, and because I am the only person who reads it, no one has to worry about protocol in a message to me.
I probably wouldn’t have to spend so long if my e-mail address weren’t semipublic. There is actually a book called E-Mail Addresses of the Rich & Famous, which includes my e-mail address as well as ones for Rush Limbaugh and Senator Ted Kennedy. When John Seabrook was writing an article about me for The New Yorker magazine, he conducted his interview primarily on e-mail. It was a very effective way to have a dialogue, and I enjoyed the piece when it appeared, but it mentioned my e-mail address. The result has been an avalanche of mail ranging from students asking me, in effect, to do their homework assignments, to people asking for money, to mail from a group interested in whales who for some reason added my e-mail name to their list. My address is also a target for both rude and friendly messages from strangers, and provocative ones from the press ("If you don’t answer this by tomorrow I will publish a story about you and that topless waitress!").
We have special e-mail addresses at Microsoft for job applications, product feedback, and other legitimate communications. But a lot of that mail still comes to me and I have to reroute it. There are also three e-mail equivalents of chain letters that keep making the rounds. One threatens general bad luck if it isn’t forwarded. Another specifically says the punishment will be that your sex life will suffer. A third, which has been going around for six years, contains a cookie recipe and a story about a company’s having overcharged a woman for the recipe, and so she wants you to distribute it for free. In the various versions different companies are named. Apparently it is the idea of getting back at a corporation, any corporation, that has made that one such a perennial favorite. This is all mixed in with mail that really should come to me, often about important issues. Fortunately, e-mail software is improving all the time and it now includes a feature that lets me prioritize mail from senders I have designated.
When I travel, I connect my portable computer back into Microsoft’s electronic mail system every night to retrieve new messages and send off the ones I’ve written over the course of the day to people in the company. Most recipients will not even be aware that I am out of the ofrice. When I’m connected to our corporate network from a remote site, I can also click on a single icon to see how sales are doing, to check the status of projects, or to access any other management databases. It is reassuring to check my electronic in-box when I’m thousands of miles and a dozen time zones away, because bad news almost always comes through on e-mail. So if nothing bad is waiting there, I don’t need to worry.
We now use e-mail in all sorts of ways we hadn’t anticipated. For example, at the beginning of the annual Microsoft Giving Campaign, which raises money for charity, employees receive an e-mail message encouraging them to participate. The e-mail message contains an electronic pledge-card program. When the icon in the message is clicked, the pledge card appears on the employee’s screen and he or she can pledge a cash gift or sign up for a payroll deduction. If the latter option is chosen, the information is automatically entered into Microsofts payroll database. From the electronic form employees can direct their gift to their local United Way or to another nonprofit organization. If they want to, they can choose to have their donation go to one or more of the charities the United Way supports, and can even access a server to obtain information about those organizations or about volunteering in their community. From start to finish it’s completely electronic. As the leader of the company, I can analyze summary information day by day to find out if we are getting good participation or if we need to have a few more rallies to get out the message about how important we think the giving campaign is.
Today, besides company-operated, text-based e-mail systems, the kind Microsoft operates for its own use, there are commercial services such as MCI Mail and B.T. Gold (operated by British Telecom). There are also offerings from all of the commercial on-line systems such as CompuServe, Prodigy, and the Microsoft Network. These perform some of the same functions that telegrams and, later, telex systems once did. Users connected to these e-mail systems can send a message to virtually anyone who has a standard Internet e-mail address. Both private and commercial e-mail systems include “gateways” that transfer messages sent by a user of one mail system to a recipient on another. You can get a message to almost anyone who has a PC and a modem, although for certain communications privacy is a problem because transmissions across the Internet are not very secure. Some commercial services, such as MCI, will also deliver a message by fax, telex, or traditional mail if the recipient doesn’t have an electronic mailbox.