Ordinary Nothing

that’s not exactly what they said, but that’s surely the only way to read it. A security vendor in the UK claims that their statistics of legitimate (i.e. not viruses and spam) emails show a direct relation between the rise in the temperatures and a decrease in email traffic.

A decrease which they attribute to the economy becoming less productive due to the heat (emphasis mine):

Email Systems says that from Monday to Fridays during the most sizzling parts of June, emailing was down by up to 20% on normal levels. It believes this is an accurate way of measuring corporate productivity across the country generally.

“The reduction in legitimate emails clearly indicates that UK businesses have suffered due to the extremes of heat, suggesting perhaps that as an economy we are simply not yet able to cope with the types of summer that experts are predicting in the years to come.”

But most email messages are generated in companies which are more technological. For starters, they have more computers, and more employees who use them. And these places, well, they tend to install Air Conditioning. They really do. But if they have a working AC system, then obviously the heat cannot have an effect on the productivity… If heat does have such a strong effect (and 20% is a lot), then it follows that all those companies don’t have working AC.

Also doubtful is their claim that the amount of email passing through them is indicative of corporate productivity across the country. Email is to some extent an indicator of a company productivity, but not necessarily a direct one, and not for all companies. Many companies simply do not have that much to do with email. Email could only be “an accurate way to measure corporate productivity across the country” if those companies behaved just like companies that live through email and the Internet. And that’s simply not true, though easy to see how a company dealing with computer security could lose sight of that. They’re just not exposed to any corporations who don’t need their services… Then again, maybe their AC broke down, and whoever came up with those claims simply didn’t drink enough and suffered an heatstroke. That would explain everything.

July 4th, 2005 at 20:47 EET | Categories: Business, Security | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.