Death-of-email articles, like Business Week’s E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago, always leave me scratching my head (especially ones like that which includes fans of intrusive IM apps — like people aren’t interrupted enough on an average day). Typically, email’s purported replacements come down to two separate product groups: a) blogs, wikis, and other tools that are very useful and could conceivably be used entirely for collaboration instead of e-mail, and b) dedicated collaboration tools that aim to create a “virtual space” where team members collaborate, share files, etc.
Central Desktop, which sells one of these “virtual space” applications, published a widely referenced post outlining some of the reasons that e-mail, with all of its faults, is still the preferred method of collaboration at most organizations. It is universal, easy to understand even by technophobes, searchable, etc., etc. Commenters add some other reasons, to which I would add that e-mail is very robust. A lot of software I use, web servers, application servers, etc., go down, get hacked, have bugs. I think I can count the number of times I haven’t been able to access my mail server over the past 5 years on one hand. On the other hand, getting some of these virtual space applications up and running and stable with multiple users can be a real pain in the ass.
The weird thing is that after the more than 2,000 word post at Central Desktop, the lesson the company seems to have taken away is that they need to make their collaboration tool incorporate some of the features that e-mail has. That seems like a silly approach — why re-invent the wheel?
Instead, companies should build collaboration tools that are e-mail centric. I use three different collaboration applications, and all of them are essentially add-ons to e-mail. They have web interfaces and in some cases some slick AJAX mojo, but 95% of the time I interact with them through e-mail.
These applications essentially augment e-mail, adding services that store, track, automatically generate, modify, etc., messages and files related to projects.
It’s amazing how useful such an application can be. Everyone already understands e-mail, so there’s no huge learning curve to get the basic interaction down. E-mail clients are universal, so you don’t have to worry that maybe the previous point release of the Mac OS isn’t compatible with the virtual space application.
E-mail just works. Which of course means everybody and their brother has to be trying to find a way to replace it.