[geeks] Gmail's attraction

Brian Dunbar brian.dunbar at plexus.com
Thu Sep 2 14:29:15 CDT 2004


On Sep 2, 2004, at 1:28 PM, Mike Hebel wrote:

>>> Come on.  Who is really incapable of all of FTP, HTTP sends, and P2P
>>> clients?  Maybe a few exceedingly strict corporate networks, but if
>>> they are that strict, I'd be surprised if they allowed email
>>> attachments either.
>>
>> Well, here in "corporate land" I have experienced many folks incapable
>> of FTP, HTTP sends and P2P clients, with the list of reason headed up
>> by a lack of interest (in the sender's part).
>
>
> That's sloppy user training by the IT person.  Unless suits are 
> preventing
> him from doing so there is _always_ some sort of solution.  Heck a 
> public
> webserver with lots of space and a time-limited storage system and a
> simple file upload/download front-end would solve this.
>

The suits at my last employer had a good reason for the restrictions 
they imposed - they didn't want anything to interfere with the process 
of dealing with us.  If Very_Small_Design Company (us) didn't do things 
the way the client wanted (including OS choices, the design tool used 
yay unto minor version numbers, method of sending and receiving files 
and so on) they'd go use someone else.

Then we'd be a bunch of PCB design geeks with a very secure means of 
sending files, high-minded ideals, tool sets based on Unix,  and .. no 
income.

We did have a not-so- minor success getting the clients to use our 
internal file-sending widget (which used secure FTP/HTTP and was easy 
to us) but some clients wanted file xfers in email and that's what they 
got.

All of which on reflection has a very bad taste now.  That company was 
bought by THIS company, and as of this month the really nifty design 
centers are no more - the last one was absorbed by an existing design 
center in another state.  All that remains are a few employees and the 
nifty file xfer tool.  Bah.

~brian



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