One of the biggest time sinks and "velocity" killers in BigTech, and sometimes also in MediumTech, is the need to get approval (sometimes multiple people's approvals) for absolutely everything. Often, approvers are among the most senior, busy people in the company, and "approving a dozen things" is not even top 100 on their list of things to do today. There are people who spend >75% of their time just "chasing" approvers and reminding them to please, please, please approve my Thing X so we can launch Product Y on time!

For sure. It kills projects and companies large and small.

In multinational megacorps this is more or less modus operandi. I am not even mad anymore, I realized this aint malice but simply inevitable as size goes up and time passes on.

The best companies that realize this can minimize it, but its inevitable.

I feel you. I keep hearing people in software say "wild west" when they mean "absence of paternalistic bureaucratic controls."

The virtual space is locked down so so so much harder than the physical because it's "free" to automate, but the vibe is it's outrageously uncontrollable. I get it when we're talking the whole Internet, but the same group of insiders?

> but the best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom

Sure. But if that's the case why do you even have individual email? Make everything a group email and group IM. Not allowed to send messages to a specific person; can only send messages to everyone. What would happen?

Can you see the flaw in this logic? Email isn't only for discussing work projects. It needs to be private for discussions involving HR, legal, and other personnel matters.

The main problem I see with this is the mess with unorganised information floating everywhere. But I see little wrong with eg having separate channels which all are accessible by everybody. In many situations this would not work well, but mostly because of the existence of other problems. I can also imagine situation where this would work much better, too.

Even with the privacy concerns aside, you need individual mailboxes for reasons of maintaining organization.

I think your point would be better made if in your hypothetical, we still had individual mailboxes, but everyone could see into everyone else's mailbox.

Steve Jobs’s email was not taken away. A guy was allowed to register an alias self-service style. Everyone could reach Jobs on his email.

Registering an alias self-service style is fine. What's potentially problematic is changing that alias once it has become established. Please read my original comment again.

And every NeXT machine came with an email waiting in your inbox out of the box from [email protected] complete with Lip Service voice message from Steve Jobs.

Of course you likely had no immediate way to reply to an internet email address like that at the time out of the box.