ONLY if it was made in 2011. Even Google seems to think that security updates for an OS should only be made available for about 1.5 years after the date of first sale.
They're pushing them out in the sense that they're making them available for every device that runs the OS that has been made in the last few years.
When Android releases a new update they usually only do it for one device, with updates for a few other devices a few weeks later (all Nexus branded). It usually takes a few months before NEW models in stores are even running it.
The reason that Apple can do this and Android can't is because Apple strictly controls the hardware iOS runs on - you can't install iOS on some phone made by HTC and sell it legally. You can do this with Android (with some limitations if you want Google branding/apps). Android is much more open, but that means that vendors who don't bother with updates are allowed to use it.
The actual update process itself is really no different between iOS and Android. It is just that with Android it is almost never used.
And that is how companies end up with multi million dollar upgrade problems.
If you save $10M over 10 years and end up with a $3M upgrade "problem" at the end of that period, it sounds like good business to me.
If those interim updates would have actually created business opportunity then that is a loss. However, usually you're talking about going from XP to Vista to Win7 vs going from XP to Win7 - no big deal as long as you keep getting updates the whole time. When a software update actually has a significant benefit it usually isn't hard to get justification for deploying it.
Phones abandoned while still under contract? Try phones are abandoned while they're still being sold in stores.
If an update comes out while the phone is still fairly new it probably will get it. The Galaxy S3 is an example - it is STILL running ICS but being a flagship phone it will probably get JB. Well, unless it turns out like the Galaxy S which was the subject of debate for a year or so back when Froyo or whatever came out.
Even the Nexus phones are generally abandoned about 1.5 years after they are FIRST sold (and the Galaxy Nexus is almost a year old now, so expect that to maybe get one more major version update next Spring/Summer).
I love Android, but their updates are REALLY poor. If you buy an iPhone every two years, you're basically guaranteed to always have the latest OS (well, aside from stuff like Siri, which I do think counts, but that is the exception). If you buy an Android Nexus model every two years you might or might not be able to run the latest OS the whole time - if you get your phones the day they come out you probably will get them all, otherwise you'll probably be six months stale come replacement time.
Well, there is certainly plenty of fault to go around:
1. You don't have to break maps to deploy security updates. 2. The android practice of not deploying security updates is one day going to lead to a massive cataclysm. If somebody manages to come up with some kind of email worm for Android you're going to see some fun times as the vendors tell everybody to just throw out their six-month-old phones and buy new ones.
No doubt. But I live in the wonderful USA, where medical billing is like people haggling over a Honda Civic and the dealer is asking for $400k, and the fleet buyer is looking to spend $19.95 but pays $10k, and the dealer tells some poor bum who walks in off the street that because they're in so much need that they can have the car for only $80k.
If I make a statement you feel is without a basis, then point it out and ask what the basis for the statement is.
My argument is that much of the cost of medical devices is due to how they are regulated. Whether a particular device could be built much cheaper or not is a matter I'd leave to an engineer. However, there is no reason that the laws can't be changed to make things more conducive to competition.
My proposal was that everybody pays the same - every insurance company, and directly paying patients.
The insurance companies ALREADY pay less than directly paying patients most of the time. There seem to be exceptions, but that probably depends on your insurance company as well.
The most likely result would be a few insurance companies that are REALLY good at negotiating discounts might pay more, and just about everybody else would pay less.
I'd be fine with doctors having a separate rate for charity-based work that is either free, or strictly the cost of materials.
In the past you might have been lucky to have a REALLY good secretary who could file those claims just perfectly so that you got the highest possible reimbursement for what was done. If the paperwork wasn't completely in order you'd get denied $10 here or there, and chances are it wasn't worth arguing.
Now with computers you can write software and EVERYBODY can have the best secretary on the planet. If a doctor calls up the EMR vendor and says they keep getting denied $10 on their claims they don't have to do anything else, and pretty soon that doctor and every other doctor in the country gets a software update that nets them an extra $10 per claim or whatever.
The problem was that the system was balanced so that doctors still made a decent income despite being denied $10 here and there. So, now they are making a lot more money, and it isn't because care has really improved.
you honestly think this is valid advice to give lay people about their healthcare?
Well, it is good advice a good part of the time based on most studies I've seen. The problem is that a lay person doesn't know whether their case falls into that category or not.
I agree with your points, though I don't think it would completely solve test proliferation to merely pay the doctor the same whether they order the tests or not (it would be a good step though).
I remember a doctor on NPR pointing out a case of a CT scan that a parent wanted for their fairly young kid, that he felt was unnecessary. The parent thought he was cost-cutting, but the doctor pointed out that the incentives were completely opposite - if he ordered the test he would be paid more, and would have a lower risk of lawsuits as well. However, the little kid would have an increased risk of cancer 50 years down the road and the evidence was that this was not worth the trade off. If he was wrong he'd have been sued, and if he made that judgment call 50 times chances are he would be sued eventually, and yet it still is the right call. Nobody sues a doctor for a CT scan that might have caused a cancer 40 years in the future, but everybody sues a doctor who misses a fractured bone.
Drugs are priced like any other product - they charge as much as they can get away with, and often they charge less until something becomes popular, so that it becomes popular. The cost of any particular drug bears no relationship to what it cost to develop, though if the company didn't think it could eventually have made a decent income from the drug they wouldn't have developed it in the first place (sometimes things don't work out, and it is better to sell it cheap than not sell it).
The catch is that it is also true that if they cost a lot less across the board, it wouldn't be profitable to research them. They certainly could cost somewhat less though, especially if they cost more in other first-world nations.
That said, tort reform is certainly part of the solution, as is drug reform, billing reform, and about a million other reforms. There really is no "one thing" that is wrong with US healthcare. It is a lot of fairly large problems that snowball into one gargantuan mess.
As far as lavish offices in expensive parts of downtown go - that really isn't a reflection of insane profits so much as insane corporate governance in the US in general. If they were losing money the last thing they'd get rid of is the lavish executive offices. The worker bees are all already working in cube farms, trust me, and if everybody works harder and pulls in an extra billion dollars that year $0 will go towards furniture upgrades for the rank and file, and most of it would go to executive bonuses.
Honestly, I think the only real fix for many of the woes we suffer is for a judge to occasionally issue the following verdict: "I find that the defendant corporation acted completely within the law. I find that the CEO of the defendant operated completely within the law and is legally shielded from any personal liability. I find that the CEO is also a scumbag. Bailiff, please shoot the CEO now, thanks." It wouldn't need to happen often - just often enough to make "taking advantage of your legal rights" a matter of rolling the dice.
The lawmakers don't have nearly the incentive to create airtight laws as everybody else has to find loopholes. So, a society that forces itself to rigidly live by the "rule of law" is forced to commit legal suicide.
The issue is that electronic records ups the ante for both sides. Medicare can better understand what is going on and optimize their reimbursement rates. The hospital can better understand what is going on and game medicare. And so on...
I suspect the goal of doctors is to take the least time possible filling out codes on a form. I know most doctor's I've seen have a checklist of codes that are common in their practice that they just mark off. They could care less if they're "accurate" as long as they're defensible.
That data goes into the computer, which likely "optimizes" them as was described. If one code describes a barrage of tests that is cheap, and 50 other codes are a la carte and more expensive, but they're still factually correct, then the program picks the latter. No doctor would sit and write 50 codes to get an extra $10 for the visit. However, a computer can transform 1 code into 50 for all 40 visits of the day in about 10 millseconds and the doctor can buy himself an iPad every other day.
Yup, 40% definitely seems high based on the ton of medical bills I've seen paid.
I love it when people say that if you pay cash the doctor will give you a big discount since it saves them a lot of hassle. The big discount turns out to be "OMG 40% off retail!!!" That means that you're paying 60% of retail, or likely double what any insurance company would pay.
If I were in charge of health care reforms the first reform I'd enact is that EVERYBODY pays the same thing for the same service. Doctors would register their prices by ICD9 or whatever in some central database, which would be publicly viewable. Oh, and doctors wouldn't be able to collect a penny without having an estimate signed off before any work was done - just like how virtually every other industry works. Oh, and while you're at it if the customer isn't handed a copy of the chart on the way out the door, then the work is free.
Why would I bother to make a cheap hearing aid that is illegal to sell in the US?
Maybe it is possible to make a cheaper hearing aid, and maybe it isn't. However, either way a cheaper model that could be paid for by medicare shouldn't be barred by law/regulation, as is currently the case.
Another note - replay attacks are preventable if you store some kind of index of card last-used dates or something similar on each terminal. That requires a sizable database, but you're talking probably less than 1GB to track every card used for a year or two. If a card had a last-update date before the date in the database then it has be replayed.
You just collect the logs, and when you see a particular card serial being used for replay attacks you put it in a blacklist file. Then the next time it is used an alarm goes off and the user gets treated like somebody who jumps over the gate.
I'm sure you could get a few replays out of a card safely, but that would be it.
Now, if you just went for a 50% discount by cloning a card once or twice, or cloning it a bunch of times and passing it around but ditching the clones after a few days, then chances are you wouldn't be easy to catch unless that log analysis were highly automated and updates were sent out at least daily. That isn't actually that hard to do though - if the reader had WiFi and uploaded/downloaded updates any time it drove by a depot you could blacklist a card hours after it was cloned.
Frankly it is crazy that programmers should have to beg for this kind of respect in the first place, but the problem is fairly widespread.
What company values a good janitor? Sure, it doesn't make sense to pay the janitor as much as the CIO, but on the other hand there is no reason that every member of the company shouldn't be valued and be given incentive to do their jobs well, and shown recognition when they do so.
I think this is the thing that small companies get which big ones don't. The owner realizes that if they lose the janitor then THEY'RE the ones cleaning the toilets. Probably when they started out they were in fact cleaning the toilets.
In big corporations people tend to get really impersonal for whatever reason and they act like the only person whose job matters is themselves, and maybe whatever job they're eyeing up to have next. Forced bell curve rating certainly doesn't help with this, which creates an adversarial relationship between peers.
I don't see why such a dial would not be an in-demand feature. You can spend $2k having a fancy hearing aid fitted, or for $150 you can buy the model with the dial and just see how it works. Perhaps allow it to be traded in towards the $2k model.
There is no reason that you couldn't have an autorefractometer in the eyeglass isle in a Walmart and you just grab whatever it offers for you. You can already browse through reading glasses that are just simple paired lenses where you keep trying them until you find one that works. However, instead we have a system where only licensed professionals can prescribe and construct eyeglasses. Do they do a better job than people could do on their own? Sure. Are they REALLY necessary? Usually not.
The problem with this is that we make the defendant bear a significant part of the costs despite the presumption of innocence. We effectively punish people simply by making them go through the process. That's a broken process.
Then we have all the issues with the adversarial system where prosecutors have the goal of obtaining convictions, not the truth.
Fixing stuff is boring. It is about making small improvements in your customer base.
Adding big new world-changing features is exciting, and you get to talk at trade shows about how you're going to increase your market share from 60% to 160%.
Agree RE social feeds in applications. If I'm at the water cooler I want to hear about my friend's nightmare manager's latest boneheaded move. If I am trying to get work done I want my friend to tell me what he needs from ME. I don't care that he just got something done on some project I have no involvement with, or that he closed 12 tickets yesterday, or that he just got a new shiny package of duct tape.
The other argument that I've heard is that young kids don't use email, so when they become workers they won't use email either. Well, back in the 80s I doubt young kids wrote memos to their friends, but they certainly did once they began work.
Teenagers are really insecure, and if 15 minutes go by and they don't see a post by their friends, they start to wonder if they still have friends. At work most people just want to get their work done and don't really need to see a twitter feed.
Personally I LIKE email - at least when the emails are done well. Sure, there are other means of communication that can work better, but it is impossible to get anybody to use those properly. If I get an email I get a description of some issue I need to solve complete with background and where the sender has taken the time to lay everything out. If I get an IM or a phone call I basically have to spend 15 minutes interviewing them so that I can essentially lay the same stuff out. Sometimes I get an email that basically says "I have a problem" and that takes 15 seconds to reply to - "send me the details" and I can usually forget all about it until the ball is back in my court. However, this isn't really an illustration of the problems of email so much as the problems of twitter posts masquerading as email.
Tend to agree. I see this sort of stuff quoted at work all the time, and it is by people who do meetings instead of work. They keep rolling out more and more social media stuff at work - the only people who use it do meetings instead of work. The only time anybody else uses it is when the boss tells everybody to post a comment on topic X or else, and so they do exactly x.
It can have uses in niches, but the problem is that many of these systems are designed almost exactly like Facebook, and most people in corporations work on a bazillion discrete projects and on subprojects that last days to weeks that each involve a different set of collaborators. So, if my colleague published a feed I'd see that 95% of their posts are stuff simply irrelevant to me.
Well, the fact is that the executives uphold all the petty rulings, and while they're at it they also act like petty tyrants with few restrictions or consequences. The only time there is real conflict is when one actually steps directly on the toes of the other, which they tend to avoid, and if it happens then whoever has the most guns wins.
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ONLY if it was made in 2011. Even Google seems to think that security updates for an OS should only be made available for about 1.5 years after the date of first sale.
They're pushing them out in the sense that they're making them available for every device that runs the OS that has been made in the last few years.
When Android releases a new update they usually only do it for one device, with updates for a few other devices a few weeks later (all Nexus branded). It usually takes a few months before NEW models in stores are even running it.
The reason that Apple can do this and Android can't is because Apple strictly controls the hardware iOS runs on - you can't install iOS on some phone made by HTC and sell it legally. You can do this with Android (with some limitations if you want Google branding/apps). Android is much more open, but that means that vendors who don't bother with updates are allowed to use it.
The actual update process itself is really no different between iOS and Android. It is just that with Android it is almost never used.
And that is how companies end up with multi million dollar upgrade problems.
If you save $10M over 10 years and end up with a $3M upgrade "problem" at the end of that period, it sounds like good business to me.
If those interim updates would have actually created business opportunity then that is a loss. However, usually you're talking about going from XP to Vista to Win7 vs going from XP to Win7 - no big deal as long as you keep getting updates the whole time. When a software update actually has a significant benefit it usually isn't hard to get justification for deploying it.
Well, the updates for Android are just as easy. The problem is that they are never sent out in the first place.
The issue with Android isn't the deployment rate of updates - it is that there aren't any updates to deploy.
Phones abandoned while still under contract? Try phones are abandoned while they're still being sold in stores.
If an update comes out while the phone is still fairly new it probably will get it. The Galaxy S3 is an example - it is STILL running ICS but being a flagship phone it will probably get JB. Well, unless it turns out like the Galaxy S which was the subject of debate for a year or so back when Froyo or whatever came out.
Even the Nexus phones are generally abandoned about 1.5 years after they are FIRST sold (and the Galaxy Nexus is almost a year old now, so expect that to maybe get one more major version update next Spring/Summer).
I love Android, but their updates are REALLY poor. If you buy an iPhone every two years, you're basically guaranteed to always have the latest OS (well, aside from stuff like Siri, which I do think counts, but that is the exception). If you buy an Android Nexus model every two years you might or might not be able to run the latest OS the whole time - if you get your phones the day they come out you probably will get them all, otherwise you'll probably be six months stale come replacement time.
Well, there is certainly plenty of fault to go around:
1. You don't have to break maps to deploy security updates.
2. The android practice of not deploying security updates is one day going to lead to a massive cataclysm. If somebody manages to come up with some kind of email worm for Android you're going to see some fun times as the vendors tell everybody to just throw out their six-month-old phones and buy new ones.
No doubt. But I live in the wonderful USA, where medical billing is like people haggling over a Honda Civic and the dealer is asking for $400k, and the fleet buyer is looking to spend $19.95 but pays $10k, and the dealer tells some poor bum who walks in off the street that because they're in so much need that they can have the car for only $80k.
If I make a statement you feel is without a basis, then point it out and ask what the basis for the statement is.
My argument is that much of the cost of medical devices is due to how they are regulated. Whether a particular device could be built much cheaper or not is a matter I'd leave to an engineer. However, there is no reason that the laws can't be changed to make things more conducive to competition.
My proposal was that everybody pays the same - every insurance company, and directly paying patients.
The insurance companies ALREADY pay less than directly paying patients most of the time. There seem to be exceptions, but that probably depends on your insurance company as well.
The most likely result would be a few insurance companies that are REALLY good at negotiating discounts might pay more, and just about everybody else would pay less.
I'd be fine with doctors having a separate rate for charity-based work that is either free, or strictly the cost of materials.
Well, sort-of. Legally it probably isn't fraud.
In the past you might have been lucky to have a REALLY good secretary who could file those claims just perfectly so that you got the highest possible reimbursement for what was done. If the paperwork wasn't completely in order you'd get denied $10 here or there, and chances are it wasn't worth arguing.
Now with computers you can write software and EVERYBODY can have the best secretary on the planet. If a doctor calls up the EMR vendor and says they keep getting denied $10 on their claims they don't have to do anything else, and pretty soon that doctor and every other doctor in the country gets a software update that nets them an extra $10 per claim or whatever.
The problem was that the system was balanced so that doctors still made a decent income despite being denied $10 here and there. So, now they are making a lot more money, and it isn't because care has really improved.
you honestly think this is valid advice to give lay people about their healthcare?
Well, it is good advice a good part of the time based on most studies I've seen. The problem is that a lay person doesn't know whether their case falls into that category or not.
I agree with your points, though I don't think it would completely solve test proliferation to merely pay the doctor the same whether they order the tests or not (it would be a good step though).
I remember a doctor on NPR pointing out a case of a CT scan that a parent wanted for their fairly young kid, that he felt was unnecessary. The parent thought he was cost-cutting, but the doctor pointed out that the incentives were completely opposite - if he ordered the test he would be paid more, and would have a lower risk of lawsuits as well. However, the little kid would have an increased risk of cancer 50 years down the road and the evidence was that this was not worth the trade off. If he was wrong he'd have been sued, and if he made that judgment call 50 times chances are he would be sued eventually, and yet it still is the right call. Nobody sues a doctor for a CT scan that might have caused a cancer 40 years in the future, but everybody sues a doctor who misses a fractured bone.
Drugs are priced like any other product - they charge as much as they can get away with, and often they charge less until something becomes popular, so that it becomes popular. The cost of any particular drug bears no relationship to what it cost to develop, though if the company didn't think it could eventually have made a decent income from the drug they wouldn't have developed it in the first place (sometimes things don't work out, and it is better to sell it cheap than not sell it).
The catch is that it is also true that if they cost a lot less across the board, it wouldn't be profitable to research them. They certainly could cost somewhat less though, especially if they cost more in other first-world nations.
That said, tort reform is certainly part of the solution, as is drug reform, billing reform, and about a million other reforms. There really is no "one thing" that is wrong with US healthcare. It is a lot of fairly large problems that snowball into one gargantuan mess.
As far as lavish offices in expensive parts of downtown go - that really isn't a reflection of insane profits so much as insane corporate governance in the US in general. If they were losing money the last thing they'd get rid of is the lavish executive offices. The worker bees are all already working in cube farms, trust me, and if everybody works harder and pulls in an extra billion dollars that year $0 will go towards furniture upgrades for the rank and file, and most of it would go to executive bonuses.
Honestly, I think the only real fix for many of the woes we suffer is for a judge to occasionally issue the following verdict: "I find that the defendant corporation acted completely within the law. I find that the CEO of the defendant operated completely within the law and is legally shielded from any personal liability. I find that the CEO is also a scumbag. Bailiff, please shoot the CEO now, thanks." It wouldn't need to happen often - just often enough to make "taking advantage of your legal rights" a matter of rolling the dice.
The lawmakers don't have nearly the incentive to create airtight laws as everybody else has to find loopholes. So, a society that forces itself to rigidly live by the "rule of law" is forced to commit legal suicide.
The issue is that electronic records ups the ante for both sides. Medicare can better understand what is going on and optimize their reimbursement rates. The hospital can better understand what is going on and game medicare. And so on...
I suspect the goal of doctors is to take the least time possible filling out codes on a form. I know most doctor's I've seen have a checklist of codes that are common in their practice that they just mark off. They could care less if they're "accurate" as long as they're defensible.
That data goes into the computer, which likely "optimizes" them as was described. If one code describes a barrage of tests that is cheap, and 50 other codes are a la carte and more expensive, but they're still factually correct, then the program picks the latter. No doctor would sit and write 50 codes to get an extra $10 for the visit. However, a computer can transform 1 code into 50 for all 40 visits of the day in about 10 millseconds and the doctor can buy himself an iPad every other day.
Yup, 40% definitely seems high based on the ton of medical bills I've seen paid.
I love it when people say that if you pay cash the doctor will give you a big discount since it saves them a lot of hassle. The big discount turns out to be "OMG 40% off retail!!!" That means that you're paying 60% of retail, or likely double what any insurance company would pay.
If I were in charge of health care reforms the first reform I'd enact is that EVERYBODY pays the same thing for the same service. Doctors would register their prices by ICD9 or whatever in some central database, which would be publicly viewable. Oh, and doctors wouldn't be able to collect a penny without having an estimate signed off before any work was done - just like how virtually every other industry works. Oh, and while you're at it if the customer isn't handed a copy of the chart on the way out the door, then the work is free.
Yikes - get up on the wrong side of the bed?
Why would I bother to make a cheap hearing aid that is illegal to sell in the US?
Maybe it is possible to make a cheaper hearing aid, and maybe it isn't. However, either way a cheaper model that could be paid for by medicare shouldn't be barred by law/regulation, as is currently the case.
Another note - replay attacks are preventable if you store some kind of index of card last-used dates or something similar on each terminal. That requires a sizable database, but you're talking probably less than 1GB to track every card used for a year or two. If a card had a last-update date before the date in the database then it has be replayed.
You just collect the logs, and when you see a particular card serial being used for replay attacks you put it in a blacklist file. Then the next time it is used an alarm goes off and the user gets treated like somebody who jumps over the gate.
I'm sure you could get a few replays out of a card safely, but that would be it.
Now, if you just went for a 50% discount by cloning a card once or twice, or cloning it a bunch of times and passing it around but ditching the clones after a few days, then chances are you wouldn't be easy to catch unless that log analysis were highly automated and updates were sent out at least daily. That isn't actually that hard to do though - if the reader had WiFi and uploaded/downloaded updates any time it drove by a depot you could blacklist a card hours after it was cloned.
Frankly it is crazy that programmers should have to beg for this kind of respect in the first place, but the problem is fairly widespread.
What company values a good janitor? Sure, it doesn't make sense to pay the janitor as much as the CIO, but on the other hand there is no reason that every member of the company shouldn't be valued and be given incentive to do their jobs well, and shown recognition when they do so.
I think this is the thing that small companies get which big ones don't. The owner realizes that if they lose the janitor then THEY'RE the ones cleaning the toilets. Probably when they started out they were in fact cleaning the toilets.
In big corporations people tend to get really impersonal for whatever reason and they act like the only person whose job matters is themselves, and maybe whatever job they're eyeing up to have next. Forced bell curve rating certainly doesn't help with this, which creates an adversarial relationship between peers.
I don't see why such a dial would not be an in-demand feature. You can spend $2k having a fancy hearing aid fitted, or for $150 you can buy the model with the dial and just see how it works. Perhaps allow it to be traded in towards the $2k model.
There is no reason that you couldn't have an autorefractometer in the eyeglass isle in a Walmart and you just grab whatever it offers for you. You can already browse through reading glasses that are just simple paired lenses where you keep trying them until you find one that works. However, instead we have a system where only licensed professionals can prescribe and construct eyeglasses. Do they do a better job than people could do on their own? Sure. Are they REALLY necessary? Usually not.
The problem with this is that we make the defendant bear a significant part of the costs despite the presumption of innocence. We effectively punish people simply by making them go through the process. That's a broken process.
Then we have all the issues with the adversarial system where prosecutors have the goal of obtaining convictions, not the truth.
Fixing stuff is boring. It is about making small improvements in your customer base.
Adding big new world-changing features is exciting, and you get to talk at trade shows about how you're going to increase your market share from 60% to 160%.
Agree RE social feeds in applications. If I'm at the water cooler I want to hear about my friend's nightmare manager's latest boneheaded move. If I am trying to get work done I want my friend to tell me what he needs from ME. I don't care that he just got something done on some project I have no involvement with, or that he closed 12 tickets yesterday, or that he just got a new shiny package of duct tape.
Agree with your points.
The other argument that I've heard is that young kids don't use email, so when they become workers they won't use email either. Well, back in the 80s I doubt young kids wrote memos to their friends, but they certainly did once they began work.
Teenagers are really insecure, and if 15 minutes go by and they don't see a post by their friends, they start to wonder if they still have friends. At work most people just want to get their work done and don't really need to see a twitter feed.
Personally I LIKE email - at least when the emails are done well. Sure, there are other means of communication that can work better, but it is impossible to get anybody to use those properly. If I get an email I get a description of some issue I need to solve complete with background and where the sender has taken the time to lay everything out. If I get an IM or a phone call I basically have to spend 15 minutes interviewing them so that I can essentially lay the same stuff out. Sometimes I get an email that basically says "I have a problem" and that takes 15 seconds to reply to - "send me the details" and I can usually forget all about it until the ball is back in my court. However, this isn't really an illustration of the problems of email so much as the problems of twitter posts masquerading as email.
Tend to agree. I see this sort of stuff quoted at work all the time, and it is by people who do meetings instead of work. They keep rolling out more and more social media stuff at work - the only people who use it do meetings instead of work. The only time anybody else uses it is when the boss tells everybody to post a comment on topic X or else, and so they do exactly x.
It can have uses in niches, but the problem is that many of these systems are designed almost exactly like Facebook, and most people in corporations work on a bazillion discrete projects and on subprojects that last days to weeks that each involve a different set of collaborators. So, if my colleague published a feed I'd see that 95% of their posts are stuff simply irrelevant to me.
Well, the fact is that the executives uphold all the petty rulings, and while they're at it they also act like petty tyrants with few restrictions or consequences. The only time there is real conflict is when one actually steps directly on the toes of the other, which they tend to avoid, and if it happens then whoever has the most guns wins.