Friday, April 30, 2004

Emphasis Below Is Mine, for What I Hope Are Obvious Reasons. Instant Messaging — a Corporate Tool? "So what does this IM stuff, which is clearly the province of young people, have to do with corporate culture? Right now, not much. But eventually it will be a mainstream tool. In fact, if you read the PDF download of a recent speech by West Publishing's President Mike Wilens you'll see an interesting discussion of IM starting on page 11. West's support personnel (who are called 'reference attorneys') use IM to provide support to law students who use the computerized legal research service Westlaw, and according to Wilens West has gone from providing 100% of their law student support through phone service to only 20%. They now provide 80% of their support to law students by way of instant messaging. Lest the point be lost, there is apparently a huge benefit to West by providing service in this way. According to Wilens, the West representatives can do 4 to 6 IM sessions simultaneously (of course, we all know that phone sessions are a strictly one-to-one interaction). So if a legal publishing company like West has found efficiencies in using IM to provide support, how long do you think it will be before this becomes a more widespread phenomenon? It's true it won't happen on a massive scale anytime soon, but it's going to happen on a massive scale eventually. My oldest daughter is going into the 9th grade next year. I'll bet by the time she graduates from college most companies are going to have started using IM to provide tech/customer support. And one can easily envision it happening even faster than that." [Ernie The Attorney] [The Shifted Librarian] comment [] 9:48:14 PM     JazzFest being broadcast. Ernie the Attorney, who lives in New Orleans, tells me that his city's famous JazzFest is being broadcast here. Tells me that tomorrow I'll even be able to listen in on Preservation Hall. Yeah, but you haven't lived until you've paid your five bucks, you sit on the floor up front, have a conversation with the band, and touch the worn wood floor. The greats have been there. It's like being in church: for music. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger] comment [] 9:18:14 PM     Report: Microsoft catches up to Palm in PDA OS market. Most PDA (personal digital assistant) users were introduced to the device through the Palm OS, but Microsoft Corp.'s Windows CE .Net operating system family has pulled into a virtual tie with the pioneering PDA OS (operating system), according to first-quarter market share information from Gartner Inc. [InfoWorld: Top News] comment [] 8:52:15 PM

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