Gartner has an interesting graphic they created which I stumbled upon after reading a CMSWire article. The image helps explain the email paradox which is email is not the best method for information sharing and distribution yet it’s not going to go away. The image compares email with social networking and looks at several variables. The most important portion of the visual which explains why email is not going to go away is ubiquity, this in my opinion is the greatest factor that is keeping email alive.
So if email isn’t going to go away what’s going to happen to it? Well there are a few interesting things that I’m seeing. Vendors such as Harmon.ie are actually leveraging email as the basis for a collaboration platform and embrace it. Other companies like the new Fluent, actually hook into your email (not for enterprise use yet but works with Gmail) and turn it into what looks like an activity stream with lots of interesting features; it basically takes email and makes a type of social network out of it, something which I find very interesting and believe we will see more of, especially around enterprise applications.
Other vendors out there are trying to get users away from email and companies such as Atos Origin are actually pledging to be a zero-email company within a few years, a daunting task. I don’t think email is going to die but I think it’s use as being the central tool for communicating and sharing and distributing information is going to change; especially within the enterprise. The challenge of course comes not just from interacting with employees but also with customers. Employees can easily rely on these types of collaboration platforms but what happens when a customer or prospect wants to get in touch with the company with a comment, complaint, or concern? Currently in this situation email still appears to be the most efficient tool BUT employees are now able to manage and respond to these emails via their internal collaboration platforms.
In other words, email may just start to act as the middle-man or routing system that moves information around between individuals but does so behind the scenes without us having to log into something such as Outlook. It can also become a simple notification system or a type of “pager” instead of an actual information sharing and communication platform.
When thinking about the future email it’s important to remember that email and phone numbers are currently the two unique identifiers that we as individuals have so it’s hard to imagine that email will completely die off.
What do you think the future of email is?
Email is not an efficient/productive tool of managing task priority, sharing information, nor encouraging open communication. Yet people spend multiple hours a day on emails. I see in the future a better collaboration messaging system largely replacing email.
Philosophy has been the mother of various disciplines: what was called Philosophy centuries ago specialized into Mathematics, Physics and so on…
IMHO what is happening to email follows the same way. Once some collaboration patterns have been discovered, they have been “extracted” from email blob to be instanciated into specific tools. So, yes, in the best world, email future sounds like “a simple notification system or a type of “pager” instead of an actual information sharing and communication platform” like you wrote.
This being said, email tools should follow the same way to survive (and to help happen the future mentionned before). These email tools should embrace these already discovered collaboration patterns beyond email used as a blob for dealing with whatever piece of information is conveyed. And, in a post “A clearer vision about Thunderbird’s possible futures” http://www.jroller.com/dmdevito/entry/a_clearer_vision_about_thunderbird – I have explored different axis of development for Thunderbird (or whatever client-side email tool): 1) the ‘application’ axis, 2) the ‘data’ axis, 3) the third way is a kind of mix between the previous ones.
Let’s note that, after having read quite a bunch of your posts about email, I noticed we are quite on the same line: email won’t die, and “There should be a way to extend email solutions to do more” as you wrote.