Rumours of the Death of Email Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
Every so often I come across a post like this one by Tod Maffin (Why Email is Dead) which argues that due to the large quantities of spam and the low signal to noise ratio many users experience these days, email’s usefulness is coming to an end. While I have the highest respect for Tod and I think you should subscribe to his RSS feed, I wholeheartedly disagree with this premise.
If it was really true that email’s usefulness is coming to an end, I can’t possibly imagine why anyone would consider purchasing NewsGator, which integrates RSS feeds directly into Outlook, the world’s most popular corporate email desktop client. Yet people do, in droves. (By the way, RSS is not what’s “next” after email. They simply compliment each other nicely.)
I, like many of you, live in Outlook for a good portion of my day. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Outlook or any other email client - the point is that business these days runs on email as much as it does on any of the other communication mediums that we have come to rely on. Phone, web, fax, email. Email use is increasing, not decreasing, and it will continue to do so.
Email is not dying. No matter how much you wish it would.
What is dying are the careers of business professionals that have not developed a reliable process for ensuring that they deal with all of their incoming email in an appropriate manner.
