Trends for the coming year -- Spam and Linux
By Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article is current as of September 6, 2002.
In case you missed some of these exciting developments over the summer, here is a short list of trends that will be affecting organizations in the next year or two.
Spam
Spam -- unwanted email -- is finally getting the serious attention it deserves as a major waste of time and computer costs. There have been long articles about spam in all of my I.T. journals recently, talking about how to control it, filter it, prevent it and even make it illegal. As people are starting to pick up email on their cell phones and Blackberries (often called Crackberries because of their addictive qualities), users are increasingly irritated by unwanted marketing. This will affect nonprofits in three ways:
- Nonprofits must start introducing spam filters for their own staff, to prevent the horrific waste of time and file storage that's involved in wading through this junk. Solutions include SpamKiller, Brightmail, SpamNet,
SpamAssassin and others.
- Email marketing campaigns must deal with the growing anger of consumers against spam, and ensure that recipients of your messages really want to get them. This isn't easy to do. People often forget that they gave permission to receive emails, and if they do forget they will blame you for inflicting it on them. The situation is made worse by the fact that one is never, never supposed to unsubscribe from true spam, because that just tells the creeps that you really exist. So unless people trust you and trust that you will honestly and quickly unsubscribe them, they will grit their teeth and just delete your messages.
- Spam filters are getting more common, and they automatically delete any messages that look like spam. Sometimes they offer recipients the opportunity of looking at filtered messages to make sure nothing important has been lost, but often they don't. That means that your email messages may be filtered out if they have the following characteristics: They are sent to anonymous recipients; they have too many exclamation marks; they ask for or offer money; they have a return address that has numbers in it; they are from a hotmail account; and more. This happened last year with some of Harvard
University's acceptance letters; up to 100 of them were deleted by AOL's spam filters. Many frustrated email users are restricting messages from countries other than North America and northern Europe, because a large number of hardcore spammers operate from the former Soviet Union and other overseas nations. This may lead to a form of systemic racism, restricting the flow of information from developing countries.
Spam is an attack on the Internet as a 'common good', and is contributing
to more rigid controls and privatization of the Internet -- a type of 'tragedy
of the commons'. So don't be surprised if people react strongly to your email
marketing messages.
Linux
Linux is the open source competition to Microsoft Windows, and it's finally
turning up on corporate desktop computers. For a long time, Linux has been
restricted to back-office applications like servers (except for serious geeks
and Microsoft-haters), but it's finally becoming easy enough for regular users
to deal with. For some articles on the subject, see Business
2.0, Star
Office is a decent alternative to Microsoft Office (though no-one seems
to say it's better), Ximian
Desktop allows a Linux computer to have a program like Outlook that hooks
to Microsoft Exchange, and even AccPac
is planning to support Linux. Part of the new
corporate interest in Linux on desktops is from Microsoft's new aggressive
pricing model. Gartner, a research company, analysed
the costs of switching from Microsoft to Linux, and found that the Linux-related
additional training and support costs may equal the savings from decreased
software costs.
Nonprofits may be affected in several ways. Registered charities can take advantage of Microsoft's low charity pricing, so should stick with that. Nonprofits that are not registered charities have a more difficult decision. Linux software is free or cheap, but it's not standard. Users and technical support people will need more training, and the desktop Linux programs are, in many cases, not mature (i.e., they are even buggier than Microsoft's products).
The risk for nonprofits is that they may be tempted to install Linux software without an understanding of the risks and costs in going for a non-standard approach. This is not a good idea.
On the other hand, Dell is selling workstations with Linux pre-installed, and
will certainly be pushing for a more usable and reliable set of Linux desktop
applications. And other computer manufacturers are seeing an opportunity to
cut costs dramatically by avoiding Windows software.
Keep an eye on the Linux space. It's getting interesting.
************
Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net
