Solving the attachment problem with SkyDrive
Every day, the average office worker receives over 170 email messages a day, and sends over 35. With that kind of volume, it's understandable that over half of the average work day consists of dealing with email.
Context & Ripple Effects
This post extends an argument that had been building since Kevin Rose's 2010 email time-saving tips piece: the problem is not any single message but the sheer volume — the blog cites over 170 received and 35 sent per worker per day, eating half the workday. Where earlier advice treated email overload as a personal-habit problem, Microsoft is reframing it as an infrastructure problem with a product answer.
The company's confirmed positioning puts SkyDrive forward as the fix for the attachment specifically — the part of email that bloats messages, trips size limits, and strands files in inboxes. The pickup across Network World, WinBeta, and MSDN Blogs shows the pitch travelling to both IT and enthusiast audiences at once.
First-order effects
- Office workers sending large files can swap attachments for SkyDrive share links, cutting message size and keeping a single live copy of the document instead of version forks across recipients' inboxes.
- Microsoft gains a reason for every email user — not just existing SkyDrive account holders — to touch its storage service during routine work.
Second-order effects
- Each shared link turns the sender's correspondents into potential SkyDrive signups, making workplace email volume itself a distribution channel for Microsoft's cloud at near-zero acquisition cost.
- Rival webmail and storage providers face pressure to bundle equivalent link-sharing into their own mail clients, since attachment-free sharing becomes a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator.
Third-order effects
- If link-sharing displaces attachments at scale, the mailbox migrates from being the transport layer for files to a notification layer pointing at cloud-resident documents — shifting where work documents actually live and who controls access to them.
- That shift pulls consumer-grade cloud storage deeper into everyday office workflow, a structural move toward the browser-and-cloud document model that Microsoft's own Office franchise would have to absorb.
The trend: Consumer cloud storage is being folded into everyday email as the replacement for the attachment, turning mail providers into gateways to their own cloud platforms.