The way the world will be run in 1997 is by plain text e-mail. We therefore need to make sure we have ways to effectively create, transmit, store and find e-mail messages. An investment in improving simple message handling will pay higher dividends and be much simpler to implement than multimedia document systems. In the next few months the bulk of Australian business is going to convert from doing business by meeting, phone and fax to doing business on the 'net. These replace the bulk of telephone calls, faxes and meetings.
Many people worry about junk e-mail and being overwhelmed by the volume of messages.
In practice these are not the problem. Junk e-mail is far easier to deal with than junk telephone calls or junk paper mail. Dealing with a volume of e-mail is not as big a problem as phone calls or paper correspondence. E-mail arrives in neat electronically readable, labelled packages. You can automatically sort and sift your e-mail to reduce the manual processing effort.