Organizational Behavior

The best personal information managers match your work style while reining in the chaos on your desk

The business history of computing has so far reflected a seesaw struggle between the forces of innovation and of standardization. During brief experimental periods, dozens of companies propose scores of solutions for emerging needs and markets. This happened in the hardware business 15 years ago, when Eagle Computers, North Star, Xerox, Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), and many other firms tried to make their products the industry standard for personal-computer architecture and operating systems. The same gold-rush mentality applies today to applications involving the Internet. This stage comes to a close when one system gains a small edge over the others, which very quickly becomes a big edge. Eventually we are left with a powerful standard-setter -- Microsoft today, conceivably Netscape tomorrow -- and a bunch of beaten competitors with their orphaned offerings. Then the creative period begins again in some other part of the industry.

Most of the software used in small- and medium-scale businesses went through this cycle in the 1980s and became standardized, even "commoditized." There are small differences in "fit and finish" among the major word-processing programs, for example. But in fundamental ways they are all similar to one another, and are all capable of handling nearly any user's needs. The same is true of the main spreadsheet programs and database managers, and the leading communications programs. Like automobiles from different manufacturers, all get you where you're going; if you know how to operate one of them, you can very quickly figure out the others.

Only one important software category has yet to go through the standardization cycle. This is the deceptively trivial sounding field of personal information managers, or PIMs. In entrepreneurial terms, the PIM business is still wide open. While the word-processing market is dominated by well-known programs from three big companies -- Microsoft's Word, Novell's WordPerfect, and Lotus's WordPro and AmiPro -- at least two dozen programs, many from tiny companies, still struggle for serious consideration as PIMs.

Symantec's Act!, Netmanage's Ecco, Cognitech's Sharkware, Telemagic's Telemagic, Borland's Sidekick, Modatech Systems International's Maximizer, Elan Software's GoldMine, Tracker Software's Tracker Two, askSam Systems' askSam, Micro Logic Corp.'s Info Select, CrossTies Software's CrossTies, Jensen-Jones's Commence, Microsystems' CaLANdar -- these and many other programs are all thought of as PIMs (some also call themselves "contact managers" or simply "organizers"), suggesting that they offer some roughly similar service to the user. In reality, the strongest similarity among them is the weird punctuation style of their names. You can master Info Select and yet not have the slightest clue about how Ecco or Commence operates. The data presentation that one program features as its central asset might be left out of others altogether. The entire PIM product line resembles financial-modeling software before the appearance of the first real spreadsheets, the now-defunct VisiCalc and Lotus's 1-2-3, or the word-processing business in the days before WordStar (now put out by SoftKey International) and WordPerfect supplanted mainframe-style editors like EMACS.

This crowded, unstandardized market -- which may seem promising if you are hoping to launch a new product but confusing if you are trying to find the right tool -- cannot last forever. Apart from the normal battle fatigue that will drive weaker competitors from the market, sooner or later some PIM designer somewhere will make a breakthrough comparable to what Dan Bricklin accomplished in 1979 with VisiCalc. That is, he or she will come up with a product that ends further debate about how PIM programs should look and what they should do because it is so clearly superior in what it offers the user. From that point on, rival companies will concentrate on refining and elaborating the design, as Bricklin's competitors did when producing ultimately far more successful spreadsheets like 1-2-3 and Microsoft's Excel. When that moment comes, the right PIM will be as indispensable to business as spreadsheets and word processors are now. Indeed, the ideal PIM could be the most valuable of all software products to professionals and managers, because it is the one that in principle would best approximate the juggling of different tasks with varying time horizons that makes up the manager's day.

But that moment has not arrived. The breakthrough has not yet occurred, and the reality of today's PIMs is far short of the ideal. How, then, can managers and entrepreneurs best employ these flawed products? In the short run, they can look for the program (or programs) from today's vast array that best suits the quirks of their personality and their business. In the long run, by knowing how PIMs should work, they can be ready for the breakthrough when it comes.

The term "personal information manager" was popularized in the late 1980s by Mitchell Kapor, founder of Lotus. In today's market "PIM" has been applied to products as narrowly focused as computerized datebooks or telephone lists, but Kapor had a much broader conception in mind. In their daily lives, he said, busy people had to cope with an enormous and ever-changing variety of information: the phone call to be returned 10 minutes from now; the business plan to present three months from now; the records of a legal battle last year. Ideally they should have a tool that would let them view data in isolation when that is called for -- just the phone calls to be placed today, just the reports from subordinates that are overdue -- but that would also let them see deeper connections among their data. With the tools then available, notably Borland's Sidekick, Kapor knew he could call up simple to-do lists and phone records. He knew of no program that would just as easily let him see larger patterns.