Is email still business-critical?
That is totally true. And when you see a big gigantic one, you really get scared.
I was a huge fan of Google Wave back when it launched, or kind of launched; that was the ability to augment email with real conversations you would come and go and have context. And, unfortunately, they got Googled and end-of-lifed. But that was before Slack and all of these other subpar solutions, that was the ability to augment email. I think email is foundational, but it can't be the be all, end all.
And human nature is to assume the worst. So, whatever you send me I'm going to assume like, "Howard's mad at me," even if he's not mad at me.
My parents always used to say, "I can hear in your tone you're upset." Well, how do you know about my tone? You can't see me, how do you know what my tone is? And email just has this implicit, underlying tone; it's just open to the interpreter.
Sure, it very quickly became a tool businesses couldn't run without. Key decisions started being made on it, and audit trails popped up (who hasn't cc'd someone in to cover their butts).
But it only became critical because we let it do so. We can still make decisions without the email trail, we can still show an audit process.
My view is that communication is business critical, we've just got to ensure we choose the right medium
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Well, I mean that's just it; what did you do before email? I mean, at first it was AOL before we even thought about doing email, so when there was no way to electronically communicate, what other alternatives did you have? Nobody was going to send a letter to do business, so I can see the current evolution to where email is today and how poorly it’s used, but at the time I'm sure it's saved a lot of time and effort for a whole lot of people.
It's been a victim of its own success, for sure.
SMTP predates AOL by more than a decade. It is one of the more poorly architected of the original transfer protocols - mostly due to issues with identity, access, and security which have never been properly addressed. It has not been until the rise of the messenger apps that there has been a viable alternative.
However, the one thing email has above all else is ubiquity. You can't receive a slack message on ms teams, or even a whatsapp message on FB Messenger. This fact has allowed email to remain the predominant communication platform for decades.
Sadly things like calendaring got bolted on to email in a way that forever corrupted them, and like Mike says below - it is the cockroach of enterprise apps. You just can't kill it.