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).