Calendars: Shame Of The Software Industry
The computer industry has never standardized how to handle calendar appointments in one calendar or in shared calendars.
My wife asks, “Did you intend to decline this appointment?” and gives me the evil eye. An entrepreneur shares a calendar appointment with me titled “Meeting with Stewart Alsop.” Google and Facebook stuff my calendar with “recommended” appointments in which I have no interest. Microsoft Exchange tells me that a calendar appointment I made with a different email address is not on my calendar, even though I can see it there.
Using calendar software is a joke, one that the software industry should be deeply ashamed of. It is a running joke that started when computers first became connected to each other in the early 1990s, more than 20 years ago. And it’s a bad joke, because my calendar is virtually unusable even though it is critical to me being productive and satisfied with my work life. (One or more of my kids have observed that my business seems to be “meeting with people”.)
Remember when there was an industry called “productivity software”? (You have to be of a certain age because this industry had its heyday between 1980 and 1995, but was dis-intermediated by the arrival of the internet and web-based applications.) The idea was to write software to help you be more productive. Somehow the software industry completely missed the idea of making calendar software that would help its users become more productive. And the internet industry (if there really is such a thing) has done almost nothing to help remediate the problem.
The popular AddToCalendar add-on shows five different data formats for calendars, including two for Microsoft alone! Do you know what the difference is between these formats? What do you pick when you are shown these options?
It appears to me that there are at least three data formats for calendars: One from Google, one from Microsoft, and one from Apple. (I see one from Yahoo from time to time, but I think that is losing ground.) Why? Do each of these companies, each of which are fabulously profitable and highly valued, think that they will make more money or serve their customers better by making their calendars different?
I use an Apple computer with Microsoft software and Google web applications. Why do I have to tell the software that wants to add an appointment to my calendar which format to use? Do I choose iCal because I use an Apple Macintosh computer? Or Outlook because I use Microsoft Outlook desktop software? Or Google Calendar because everyone else seems to be using that?
Note to the complainers, look in the mirror:
If you only use Microsoft Windows with Windows-based applications and mobile devices and everyone around you uses the same stuff, this is not a problem.
*If you only use Macintosh OS with Apple desktop applications and mobile devices and everyone around you uses the same stuff, this is not a problem either.
*If you only use Google web- and desktop applications on either Windows or Macintosh and Android mobile devices, this is also not a problem.
Get the drift?: If you and your immediate family and fellow workers commit themselves to a particular set of products from one vendor, you won’t have a problem.
This calendar thing has become an issue in my marriage because my wife uses Google for everything: email, calendar, file sharing, document creation and sharing. She doesn’t care or know about Outlook and doesn’t like Apple’s software (Mail, Calendar, etc.) So she expects that when she shares a calendar item with me, that I will accept it (or reject it with some risk!) and that it will be updated when she changes it. But her calendar invitations do not update in Outlook. I frequently end up with two identical (or even slightly different) items in my calendar, one from Google and one from Microsoft importing Google’s. If I delete one to keep my calendar orderly, well… See above.
It is an issue in my company because we use Microsoft Exchange as the base service for managing our email, contacts, and calendar. But virtually all of the companies we invest in use Google applications. We use Outlook because it is approved as secure and reliable by the Intelligence Community, and certain of my partners need to meet the standards for security to maintain their clearances in that community. (Microsoft Exchange is still the corporate standard for email and personal information management, protecting its majority market share for email software of more than 80% with the more recent introduction of what it calls Office 365, an integration of its on-premise server software with standard internet and web-based applications.)
I personally hate Microsoft Outlook, the consumer application the company provides for both Windows and Macintosh operating systems. I have developed a hate-hate relationship with this software because I have been using it for more than 20 years on both Windows and Macintosh platforms and know every flaw intimately. (For instance, why does Microsoft update its updating software before updating its applications on MacOS rather than just use the built in updating software that Apple provides all software developers? But don’t get me started!)
I recently started using Google Calendar on my iPhone and iPad to see if that works better. Amazingly, Google Calendar slurps up calendar invitations from Microsoft Exchange and displays them correctly without complaint, but since I am synchronizing my Google Calendar to Microsoft Exchange, it also shows the Microsoft version of the appointment side by side with the Google version of the appointment, in full duplex. (Microsoft Outlook does the same thing in reverse, but treats the Google appointment as a foreign object that must be handled differently.)
In theory, one might expect Apple — as the designer and vendor of the operating system I use, which is reputedly much easier to use and more accommodating to the user than any other (i.e. Google or Microsoft) — to take responsibility for solving this conundrum. But, instead, Apple has chosen to make its own desktop and web applications and to adopt different data formats for email, contacts and calendar items! It is way too hard to describe what a mess this makes of this data on the Apple platforms, but trust me that it is a mess.
This conundrum, however, is one of the most wicked technical problems to solve in all of computing: establishing a single copy of a data record independent of multiple potential sources of the same data. In the domain of keeping accurate records where it really matters (like your bank account or a company’s record of your paycheck or invoices, etc.), this problem is solved with something called the “two-phase commit”. This data-synchronization problem is the core problem that Oracle Corp. solved nearly 40 years ago and built an enormous and valuable company around.
The underlying problem: These system vendors do NOT believe that your calendar data is data that really matters. In more than 20 years now of connected devices (first, networked computers and then internet-connected mobile devices), none of these vendors have acted as though your data was important enough for each of them to decide to work with all the others to make that data secure, permanent and accurate.
This is why, over the past 20 years, I have lost most of the calendar data that I (or others on my behalf) have entered into computers as well as the contact data for people I know, lots of the email data and even some of the photo data and music and other media-related data that I have stored in computer systems from time to time. Much of my personal history that could have been recorded permanently has been lost because the vendors were so tied up in their strategic issues that they forgot to take care of my concerns as a customer.
So… using calendar software has been and remains a joke. We can all wish for one of these vendors to provide the leadership needed to fix the problem, but none of them see the problem since they live in pure environments as I described above: Microsoft people all use Windows; Apple people all use Macintosh and IOS; Google people use different desktop computers but all use Google apps everywhere. I’m feeling old and crotchety, but no longer believe that the problem will be fixed.
PS: Yes, I am an investor. No, I am NOT interested in investing new calendar or email software just because I wrote this rant about how bad it is. (@rahulvohra: You’re speshul.) I view this as a systems problem that can only be solved the three major system vendors cited above. It is not an opportunity to make ridiculous amounts of money, which is my job as a professional investor.