Communication, Collaboration and Technology: Back to the Future: a new whitepaper, co-authored by Ray Ozzie and Peter O'Kelly.

To build better products for communication and collaboration, we need to get back to basics -- to revisit the ways in which people actually communicate and collaborate in the real world, to factor in the opportunities presented by computing and networking technology, and to then design products that embody the best of both worlds. It's fundamentally important for software products to directly support the communication and collaboration patterns and dynamics people naturally use, rather than just dealing with subsets of the problem space and leaving integration up to unsuspecting and overwhelmed individuals and organizations. We need to go back to the future, to recapture the early enthusiasm for how communication and collaboration technologies can augment interpersonal interaction while avoiding the limitations that have constrained earlier collaborative software products.