AOL Time Warner's psychic staff

By Mark Gibbs
Network World, 02/18/02

"AOL has reported an issue with e-mail. Two percent of e-mail is being lost. If you are expecting critical e-mail, you may want to follow up with the sender. AOL is working on the problem and will contact us when it is resolved."
- A Jan. 29 message from Warner Music Group Information Services to all divisions regarding a few minor e-mail inconveniences that users can easily solve for themselves if they are psychic.

In most organizations, being psychic usually is not a condition of employment. On the other hand, the ability to use logic would seem desirable. For example, in IT when you make decisions about which applications should be used, all you need is simple logic: Will such-and-such an application cost me money or save me money? Will users be happy and be able to do their work? These are basic questions.

Now if you are a huge corporation that uses Microsoft Outlook, upgrading can be extremely expensive. There's a good reason to migrate to a less-expensive alternative . . . if the alternative actually is a replacement.

So let's take AOL Time Warner as an example. As AOL had acquired Netscape a few years ago, it must have seemed like a terrific idea to adopt the Netscape product for internal mail.

So it was decreed last year that the entire AOL Time Warner family would use Netscape or the AOL client for e-mail, and Outlook would be dropped. A couple of weeks ago Warner Music Group migrated to Netscape 6.2, but from the comments I've heard from Warner Music Group staff, nobody is particularly happy. IT staffers are so ticked off that they are wearing "I hate Netscape" T-shirts.

The problems are about features and functionality, and lack of end-user training might be making things worse. To begin with, Netscape 6.2 lacks features that Warner Music Group users had grown used to in Outlook.

For example, automatic Out-of-Office responses were relied on because staffers travel a lot. When the users complained to the IT guys, they were told to send messages to everyone who might send them mail. Perhaps it will become a requirement of employment that staff members be psychic.

Other missing features include the ability to enter a name and have it expanded automatically to include the e-mail address - now every address has to be typed in fully. And it gets better. Distribution lists cannot be edited or copied and pasted. They can only be retyped.

You want more lost features? Users can no longer send large attachments, so they're back to faxing materials to international departments. One of my informants also complained about the loss of pro-active e-mail alerts - they now have to hit "get mail" to find out if they have new mail.

Another staff member told me: "Everything used to go into new mail and stayed there until you moved it - now it gets transferred automatically to old mail once opened, [a process that] can be immediate or take hours - and while it is being transferred it is effectively lost! And you have to keep checking old mail because sometimes new mail gets automatically filtered to old mail. It looks like a ghost is clicking on my mail! I reported this to IT a week ago, and the response was 'Oh yeah, we got a couple of calls about this' but they didn't elaborate. I'm on the phone literally once a day to the help people - I'm wasting at least 20 or 30 minutes per day."

This is a good example of not paying attention to what your users need while paying too much attention to what the corporation "thinks" is a good idea.

And even if you dislike Microsoft and Outlook, you have to admit the software is more or less a killer app. And when a killer app becomes part of your corporate culture, it takes an incredible product to displace it. Netscape 6.2 is not that product. Then again, if you're psychic, you already knew that.