Email. Thought it was going somewhere?
Charlie has an excellent point in this post about email.
So, while the kids, with their rock and roll and their ripped jeans and hacky sacks… err.. chrome spinners, may not have a need for e-mail now, it’s not going away anytime soon. Plus, most alternative methods, like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, require both the sender and the recipient to both be on the same social network. E-mail is a least common denominator. We all have one and it requires no additional signup/login to send someone a message.
There’s been lots of talk about how we need Inbox 2.0 or that kids don’t use email any more (only IM, social network messaging, etc) but remember, they’re not in the work force. Typically, the work force moves at a snails pace (with technology infrastructure) so when kids come of legal age to work, they’ll be using email for the foreseeable future.
Just because a kid uses IM or MySpace to send messages, don’t mean his boss will want to use that. At the end of the day, sending a spreadsheet or pitch document to your team/boss is necessary - whether it’s thru an attachment or an online URL; and email, as Charlie says, is the lowest common denominator of everything [today].
Fred recently (today) posted about messaging and that’s the larger conversation here. If you step back to 30,000 feet and look at email/SMTP/POP/Exchange/rss/sms/IM/etc - it’s all about messaging. He believes that there will be open platforms and that’s where it’s going in the foreseeable future. I agree. If my Outlook could send SMS messages/IM/etc - and group it all in one place, that would be fantastic. A great name for this would have been Grand Central, but that’s taken by another startup (now owned by Google) in the telephony industry. We should potentially call this Penn Station?
We all love innovation and in my opinion, there’s a heck of a lot of it occuring right now in the technology scene. Entrepreneurs are turning out radical new ideas almost daily and we haven’t caught up to even 10% of what they are churning out. Just because kids are using IM to converse with each other, doesn’ t mean we should drop what we’re doing now to adopt these alternative methods of communication. They aren’t mutually exclusive. Also, lets not get too far ahead of ourselves for the innovation curve. Innovation is great - but consumer adoption is more important (to build a sustainable business).
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Tags: adoption, avc, charlie, consumers, email, fred wilson, inbox, innovation, instant messaging, trends
November 16th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
This reminds me a bit of a post on my blog a few months back.
(linked with my name)
On GigantiCo, July 13th,
>
> …we are too close to it… this is a product of working in the industry…
>
> The first thing that is immediately apparent is that Email and Instant Messaging
> are still the killer apps, and that the people you really know are in your Phone list.
November 16th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Different channels / different uses. There are a million reasons to communicate, and there will be an increasing number of ways to do so. Reasons and channels will match-up, shuffle from group to group, but Charlie’s right: most jobs and partnerships will continue to be foraged through email and telephone over FB and Twitter.
November 17th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
No, it should probably be called Port Authority!
That’ll give it just the right image it needs.
November 21st, 2007 at 5:37 pm
“most alternative methods, like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, require both the sender and the recipient to both be on the same social network”
Just to be devil’s advocate here, I remembered a professor in a computer science class telling me once (a while ago obviously) how email was wonderful for university use, but it would never replace sending a letter. Why? Because you always knew that a person had a postal address, but email was a “closed system” you needed a username & password for.
Anyone who think email can’t go away should keep a sense of history. Of course it can go away (or at least be rendered irrelevant for most use cases). If everyone has a IM account, or a Myspace account, or some interoperable standard yet to come about then it very well might.
Most teens these days don’t use email. By the time they become bosses, they may not want the people they hire to use email either.
November 22nd, 2007 at 2:38 am
Darren,
i agree with an open platform. I actually think facebook has the potential to become this - if they want to. Actually this sounds like the Cisco Human Network commercial what you describe. I agree that there is a lot of innovation today but not a lot of intelligent innovation. Most innovation is in features not functions and a lot of crap “web2″ ideas are out there would be lucky to be features or are just not long term plausible. I think the biggest problem with innovation is that most the people innovating don’t have any experience or are looking at an exit instead of trying to build value and thus creating useless things. I think a lot of entrepreneurs today just need a lesson in marketing. my 2 cents…
Richie
November 22nd, 2007 at 2:40 am
Darren,
i agree with an open platform. I actually think facebook has the potential to become this - if they want to. Actually this sounds like the Cisco Human Network commercial what you describe. I agree that there is a lot of innovation today but not a lot of intelligent innovation. Most innovation is in features not functions and a lot of crap “web2″ ideas are out there would be lucky to be features or are just not long term plausible. I think the biggest problem with innovation is that most the people innovating don’t have any experience or are looking at an exit instead of trying to build value and thus creating useless things. I think a lot of entrepreneurs today just need a lesson in marketing.
In terms of email, i think we need a singular communication platform - Meebo + Gmail in imap + file storage/sharing = total communication
my 2 cents…
Richie
November 22nd, 2007 at 9:37 am
I’m looking forward to an open platform that combines communication. I don’t think email is going anywhere for the foreseeable future but you never know (to Nabeel’s point).