Microsoft doesn't like attachments, prefers you use "Skydrive"
Microsoft, not surprisingly, stacks the deck a bit regarding How Awful Attachments Are. For instance, it's not clear to me that people who lose where they saved their attachment and delete the original email aren't going to lose where on Skydrive it is or delete the original email that told them.
That said, using email for collaborative documents is, even if just two people are involved, a not-very-efficient method of working. But it's fairly simple and straightforward: the sender can just keep the file on their own hard drive rather than a slower web drive; the sender doesn't have to worry about who has rights (and of what kind) to the file or directory; collaborators don't have to worry about explicit check-in/out or two simultaneous workers overwriting a doc, etc.).
And that having been said, it's unclear why Skydrive is, for the arguments given, any more cool or useful than Dropbox or Google Docs, etc.
Still, it's an interesting set of arguments for Microsoft to be making. #ddtb
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Microsoft says, "Attachments Suck" in new infographic
Microsoft has released a new and entertaining infographic that promotes its Skydrive cloud-based service for transfers of documents, stating flat out that "Attachments Suck."
I don't suppose skydrive is any different than any the products you mentioned… except that it will come with windows 8, which means a lot of home users who don't know to look, will use that without thinking, giving it a burst of users.
What will be interesting is who will make a play to link their web-disk to existing software as a service providers… Dropbox and box.net I think are most likely candidates to be neutral enough to bridge MS, Google, Apple, and vendors like salesforce to provide a single drive, accessible from all services.
Do you have some kind of sub-space transmission thingie that ports comments made on your G+ posts over to the same post on your blog? What is this sorcery!?
@George – This sorcery is the Google+Blog plug-in for WordPress. Which is working pretty well for me (aside from some odd comment timestamp flaws), but which caused Les all sorts of problems. http://www.minimali.se/google+blog/
+George Wiman, I think it's a scaling issue. There aare times when email attachments are the most trivial thing to do. Using them as a proxy for collaboration becomes more problematic (even if that's something I still see all the time at the office).
You can bet that Microsoft will make access to the Apple cloud just a bit inconvenient for Windows users, and Apple will do the same in reverse. Companies that want to use more than one platform will have to use a third party.
Once upon a time there was a saying; "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." Doubtful that Microsoft has changed all that much.
The take-home message for me is; use something besides email attachments. The reason lies in the difference between SMTP and HTTP as much as it does document workflow.
+Andrew Eva, thanks for the clarification. So Skydrive is built into Win8? Interesting. Is it simply the mechanism (to which other services can be plugged in), or is it its own Dropbox-like service that MS owns and manages?
It is its own service that ms manages and is linked to hotmail and office 365. It has been around for a while, but now it will be built into Windows as 'save to skydrive'… You user profile and preferences can also be sync'd so that if you login with your MSN login wherever and get your desktop, if you so choose.
When I get back in front of a pc, I will dig up the Windows blog post about it.
Cool, thanks.
+Dave Hill — sorry it took so long, there is the link to the Windows 8 Blog post about skydrive integration: http://goo.gl/HV6kS
Thanks, +Andrew Eva … I'll check it out.