The X1 Blog

Our CEO, John Waller, recently participated in a Bloomberg Businessweek debate regarding the ‘health’ of storing digital information.  It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone in the X1 community that we consider ‘e-hoarding’ to be intelligent, especially for people employing a fast retrieval tool like the X1 Professional Client!  Here is the text from John’s argument:

In an age of ever-increasing computing power and ever-decreasing storage costs, is there really any harm in ignoring the delete button? The bottom line is the volume of information isn’t the issue; findability is. If you can find whatever you’re looking for instantaneously, the total volume of information stored doesn’t matter.

We can draw an analogy to the greater Web. The size of the Web continues to grow exponentially, but it causes no problem, because Google has solved the findability problem. We don’t wish for fewer Web pages out there. Instead, we care about finding the right Web page in the shortest amount of time. No matter how much we obsess about creating and organizing our bookmarks, in almost all cases, searching Google is the shortest route to the best answer.

Heavy users of e-mail see upwards of 200 to 300 messages per day. Add documents, spreadsheets, and presentations and this number balloons. How does the average professional know what will not prove to be valuable information months and years later?

As businesses continue to use e-mail as the primary form of communication, keeping a digital trail of conversations and documents is critical, making deletion an increasingly irresponsible action. Findability remains the key, and today’s impressive search and retrieval tools for e-mail and personal files make virtually any digital information available with just a few keystrokes.

The opposing viewpoint and commentary can be found here.

We’ve republished a few blog posts from 2010 below that touch on this subject matter.