The Death Of Email: What Does Dead Mean, Exactly?

Over at the Enterprise 2.0 blog, I write about The Death Of Email: What Does Dead Mean, Exactly?.

There has been a great deal of discussion about email recently. I think the proximate cause is the arrival of Google Wave, which is being heralded like the coronation of royalty. (I will leave a review of Wave to another venue, since the introductory video from Google is 85 minutes.) But the rise of tools like Twitter have also raised questions about the future state for email.

A few years ago, in 2004 or 2005, I was chairing a panel at Supernova on ‘The Future Of Email’. JP Rangaswami was there, as was a fellow from some email spam prevention company. I got in hot water immediately buy making the following arguments:

1. Email is not really well-designed relative to its ostensible purpose — which is to support communication between people that are well-known to each other, and have an on-going relationship, for example working on a project together within a company.
2. Email is very good at things that seem like spam: sending unsolicited and perhaps unwanted messages to people that are unknonw aside from their email address. The basic protocols of store-and-forwarding of email means that email can be filtered into spam folders, but it basically has to be delivered.
3. The adoption of instant messaging and chat products in business have been shown to decrease email and telephone communications by a sizable extent, sometimes as much as 30% or more. This suggest that features of these technologies — like persistent chat rooms, and instant message presence — offer real benefits that can’t be supported by telephone and email communication.
4. Lastly, there is a strong generational gradient away from email: teenagers and young people dislike it, and view it as a corporate tool that they only use to talk to companies, and never with their friends, with whom they are most likely to text or talk on the phone.

I suggested that the logical outcome of these trends was the eventual death of email, which would like follow some sort of S-curve, as people began to defect from it, and transition onto existing and as-then-unknown alternatives.

I was almost tarred and feathered.

To read the entire post, visit the Enterprise 2.0 blog.