Why
Email Will Be Obsolete by 2020
Stick
a fork in your email--within five years, something else is going to replace it.
What's
going to happen to digital communication over the next five years? Will we
still be weeding out unimportant messages and fishing through enormous email
chains trying to find one pesky link to a business plan? Will we still battle
to get to inbox zero?
I
sure hope not.
I'm
predicting that a new communication channel will replace email by 2020. In
fact, there are already signs that business is starting to move away from email
as a primary form of digital communication. We have so many alternatives. You
can send a text message or a DM on Twitter. You can drop someone a
note on Facebook or start a chat.
In
my own workday, email has become less and less important. There are entire
groups of people (public relations, for one) who contact me primarily on social
networks first. Friends never send email anymore. They almost always send a
text or chat on Facebook. Even a few of my colleagues tend to use apps likeCampfire more than email.
Many
companies are starting to use tools like Slack to create group
discussions and relying much less on email. There are a few important reasons
for this. One is that Slack creates a public archive of discussions which is
easily searchable. Everyone sees what you are talking about and can add
comments. Another reason is simple overload. There are too many portals and not
enough good communication. Slack is one good attempt to try and gather business
intelligence into one private portal.
Meanwhile,
email has become a black hole. People don't respond--or they take forever to
respond (which is sort of the same thing). A discussion starts nesting into
multiple threads with multiple people and no one can make any sense of it
anymore. Spam filters become overly aggressive. We spend hours per week trying
to get rid of unimportant messages. By 2020, someone will have figured out how
to make digital communication much more efficient. We don't have the answer
yet, but it's clear that many people don't even use email outside of work. If
you are under 20, it's possible you don't even have a personal email account at
all, or, if you do, you rarely check it.
It's
hard to imagine right now. We tend to think the technology we have today--the
apps and services we rely on so heavily--will always stick around. The social
network of today will be the social network of tomorrow. But that's never true.
Technology evolves. People create new services. In 2010, apps like SnapChat (for
photo messaging) and Meerkat (for live video streaming) didn't even exist.
Five
years is a long time in technology, and yet it is not that long at all. In
2010, we had easy access to the high-speed internet, cars had some of the same
emerging safety tech they have now, like collision mitigation braking, and
smartphones were common. (It's easy to forget the iPhone was released way back
in 2007 and Android debuted in 2008.)
Yet,
in just five years, social networking has hit the roof. Facebook has quadrupled
in value. In 2010, Twitter users sent only about 50 million tweets per day. They now send over 500 million. In terms of car technology, just five years
ago, the idea of a car driving itself on the highway was a distant dream. Tesla
will probably make it a reality this summer. And no one expected
virtual reality to make such a splash in 2015, but it is quickly becoming a
legitimate market segment.
Maybe
digital messaging will morph into something brand new. I'd love a tool that
knows, monitors, understands, and archives the digital communication methods I
use automatically. It could be a one-stop shop for all messaging, including
texts, chats, social nets...everything. Today, that's not really possible
because it is all so fragmented. Heck, Facebook chats alone are held in a
digital jail cell. And my texts are all entirely self-contained.
Email
has mostly worn out its welcome. By 2020, it won't be the primary form of
communication anymore. I can't say what will replace it because I don't think
the idea has been invented yet. (Slack is too self-contained, although maybe
the company will use some of their investment money to tackle that problem,
too.) We won't even bother
putting an email address on a business card. Come to think of it, hopefully
those won't exist, either.
BY JOHN
BRANDON
http://www.inc.com/john-brandon/why-email-will-be-obsolete-by-2020.html
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