Groundhog Day: Email is dead again... not!
Posted by Nick Mehta on Wed, Oct 14, 2009 @ 11:04 PM
One of my favorite movies of all time is Bill Murray's masterpiece, Groundhog Day. In the movie, Bill is stuck in a small town in my native Pennsylvania, where he wakes up each day to repeat the day before.
Every year, I read the same article and I feel like I'm stuck in that movie. You know that article. The one with the brilliant insight that we get too much email and that we can't keep up. And that some (IM, SMS, facebook, twitter, Google Wave) new technology will repeat it.
Well here's the latest Groundhog Day sighting from the Wall Street Journal:
Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.
In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold-services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate-in ways we can only begin to imagine.
You can read my thoughts at my last post on this topic, after the last article with exactly the same theme, about a year ago. These articles seem to pop up once a year, as predictably as Punxsutawney Phil finds his shadow.
Admittedly, since I run a cloud-based email archiving provider, I'm highly biased.
However, many others agree with me. As analyst Michael Osterman put it in his response, the reason these email death sentences are ridiculous is that the new communication media tend to be complements to, not replacements of, email:
Further, it's important to understand that email is not really competitive with instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook or other tools -- for the most part, these tools are complementary. For example, if it's 3:00am and I need to send a file to someone, I will have little expectation that the recipient will be available via IM, and I can't send them a file on Twitter, but I can send them an email knowing they'll receive it in the morning. If it's 10:00am and I need a quick answer to a question, I can IM someone whose presence status I can see. If I want to follow the comments and news pointers from people whose opinion I consider valuable I will use Twitter. If I need to collaborate on a project via a shared workspace, I will use any of the growing number of tools built for that purpose.
Similarly, blogger Email Tide points out that the beauty of email is that it keeps evolving:
In reality, email is still evolving to better handle the vast amounts and types of information that it was never intended for. New social networking services, instant messaging, voice, video, presence, wikis, blogs, bookmarking, media sharing and micro blogging will eventually all come together and complement each other, and email will definitely be part of the mix. Solutions such as Xobni or Baydin are leading the way to a more useful and better-integrated mailbox.
So email isn't dead and probably won't be for quite a while. However, that doesn't mean we'll stop talking about it.