Check out my guest post on the Doodle blog:

Everything but the coffee: The evolution of the automated secretary.

In this post I discuss the hopes, back in the nineties, that MS Outlook and other Office tools could make the trusty secretaries of old redundant (you could type your own letters and set your own meetings, right?), and how we found before long that a an 80386 microprocessor with some 300,000 transistors was no match for a human with 100 billion neurons. I then discuss the case of setting meetings, and why Outlook in itself is incapable of doing it right. Finally I take a look at the new tools that do a far better job – not because our microprocessors now have billions of transistors, but because the tools combine artificial and natural intelligence to do a better job.

But go ahead and read it over at Doodle!

Image courtesy htlcto, shared on flickr under CC license.

Related post:

Default Settings for Scheduling a Productive Meeting