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Why Email Is Still The Most Adopted Collaboration Tool
An anonymous reader writes "Isaac Garcia, the founder of a Web 2.0 Collaboration Software company,
writes bluntly about why Email is still the preferred and most adopted collaboration solution around.
'So, why are Collaboration Software Vendors (Central Desktop included), keen on vilifying email and so quick to promise a practical alternative to the chaos of email? And, if the vendor's software is so much better than email, than why do users revert back to email as soon as they hit a snag in the system? Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?'"
It has worked and it continues to work well despite all the short comings mentioned in the article. Because of this people have adopted the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude.
At least that's my two cents.
So, why are Collaboration Software Vendors (Central Desktop included), keen on vilifying email and so quick to promise a practical alternative to the chaos of email?
;)
So they can increase their profits by selling businesses software they may not even need.
And, if the vendor's software is so much better than email, than why do users revert back to email as soon as they hit a snag in the system?
Because email works, period.
Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?
Usually, it will just be another application to learn aside from your email and IM, and doesn't provide any greater functionality.
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He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I think this is the reason that the article is searching for.
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- Douglas Adams
The biggest problem I see with users failing to accept a new system and reverting to old bad habits is a lack of real training in how to use the system, and more importantly, why it is better. People need to adjust to new ways of working, and not everyone is capable of being thrown in at the deep end and working things out for themselves. But time and time again I see projects where there is simply no budget allocated for user training, and when it all falls down us developers get blamed.
Jolyon
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Off the top of my head, three reasons email rules the roost:
1. It's ubiquitous. Everyone has it, and everyone uses it. You never run into any snag because your mother doesn't use the same collaboration tool (for planning your dad's 60th birthday) as your company uses (for planning the company president's 60th birthday).
2. It fails gracefully. Everybody knows email isn't perfect, and that the user's actions have a large inpact on it, so you always plan around the fact that people are forgetful, misplace things, delete stuff without meaning to and so on. You send reminders, ask for real confirmation replies (not automated calendar updates), keep a look at the general email banter for signs of misunderstandings and so on. If an email is misplaced, it will probably get caught or planned around.
3. It has an obvious mental model. An email is a note. You pass it to people, make copies of it, forward it, delete it. There is no complex internal state to the system to (mis)understand. All functional complexity lies with the users - and we're extraordinary good at understanding that particular complex system, and indeed find it joyful to do so.
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Yes, it has its shortcomings, and honestly, given the choice I would not use something as inflexible and unwieldy as EMail to coordinate groups.
But you have to look at the problems and the possible solution. And finally you have to conform to the least common denominator. And more often than not, that's EMail.
Look at your task, look at the problems, look at the shortcomings your environment has and you'll find that EMails are for many problems the only solution that fixes ALL your problems. Not as good as many other options, but at least they work.
Scenario: You have 5 people. Distributed over the world. One of them traveling all the time and the only access to the net he has is his cell. This alone puts many coop-tools out of the ability to serve as the underlying structure. A few more are culled when you look at the quirks of his cell (find two brands that work the same way...). Then have some strict guidelines that keep you from installing "unapproved" software (and knowing how long it takes 'til you get approval, you know that you won't be able to keep any deadline if you wanted to use the soft), so you could only use coop tools that don't inject themselves into your system so you can be SURE it won't interfere with other software you're using, squat, another bunch of coop tools leave the pool.
And after you're done, you're sitting there with EMail again as the only viable option. So far, that's what I've been experiencing. Maybe someone will develop a tool that is as omnipresent and easy to use and integrate as EMail, and he will definitly take the market. But so far, no such thing.
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COMPUTERS Is Just that COMPUTERS. And they are all stressed to hell. I had a client of mine attempt to hook two computers together with a phone line. Wtf.. I asked him if he would put glue on a brick and stick it to another brick... and quite didnt understand. Computers should be left to its "algorithms"- dont start adding layers to something that was never meant to be.
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Email is not the dominant collaboration tool, because it is not a collaboration tool. It is an asynchronous communication medium targeted at human beings.
Being a medium and not an application means that different applications can be built upon it. This is sometimes good (automated project management notifications), sometimes indifferent (your sister-in-law who forward every joke she hears to everyone she's ever met) and sometimes bad (sapam).
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"Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?"
Because with most tools you spend more time 'collaborating' than you do actually working. You've got to love the PM's that spend so much time in preparation of a project that they miss the delivery date before even getting the programmers to start writing code.
TFA confuses things a bit by focusing on the features of email. BCC and CC, searchability -- yeah, those are useful, but I'd guess many, if not a majority of email users don't use them. And when you get to email clients, those things offer practically no help as to email's success. Whatever you do, don't emulate outlook as an interface (and yes, I've been using outlook almost exclusively for nearly a decade)
Yes, the author is right that everyone's being familiar with Email helps it, and it's not something that everyone has to learn; likewise with SMTP being the common thread.
But well, I think the reason's a lot simpler. Email is simply more versatile than any number of collaboration tools because it can adapt to any number of tasks, and can be used in any number of ways. And underneath that is a basic design lesson that is most misunderstood. A good tool is one that can be used in a variety of ways, and people will prefer good tools. The problem is that, in the software world "use in a variety of ways" gets misunderstood. Take a flathead screwdriver. "use in a variety of ways" means, in addition to turning screws (its predominant application in many environments), it can open paint cans, punch corks into winebottles, and, eventually, serve as a magnet. To your "office software design committee", "use in a variety of ways" means, in addition to turning screws by being rotated, it can turn screws by pressing a button, or by affixing the screwdriver into an optional clamp attachment and rotating the object with the screw around the driveer. But the minute you apply it to a paint can, it breaks.
The point is, people don't need many ways to do the same thing; they need one tool that can do many things.
So let's return to the office collaboration thingembob: the annoying thing about office software for me is that it makes assumptions about what kind of work I'm going to be doing. And somewhere, that work falls under the rubric "business", and, like the syllabus for an MBA, includes all kinds tidbits and distractions that nobody in the business world ever uses.
The point is: email is not only simple; it can be used in many different ways. In any group, you'll have different levels of computer expertise and different levels of group involvement. Very rarely and in a few fields are the two linked. If you're building software for people to work together, don't focus on "expert users" or giving anyone specific training: make it do as little as possible, as simply as possible. After all, as I tell people repeatedly, it is much more efficient for most people to know how to do a few basic things in relatively inefficient manner, than to learn all the bells-and-whistles of a complex piece of software.
Things that are easy in the IT world, aren't elsewhere. Try setting up a revision control system for editing 14th-century Latin manuscripts.
It's also a low-energy medium. You can answer messages when they come in or wait until you're ready and format the messages however you want. Most collaboration systems require a lot of user focus either to respond in real time or to satisfy strict interface requirements. E-mail allows people to communicate in their own way, not the way of the application.
A few years ago, a 500K file was routine and we were able to e-mail those. Now 500 MB files are pretty routine. My computer can handle it, the network can handle it, my memory stick (used to be floppies) can handle it. Why shouldn't my e-mail handle it too?
While you're using mailed bricks as a metaphor, I'd put a postage stamp on a brick and mail it if that was what I needed to do for my job. In other words, I do what I need to do to get my job done. Sometimes I have to do it in a way that doesn't make sense from the outside. Believe me, I'm trying to fix that. But in the meantime, I mail the brick because I have to. Everyone can receive the brick I mail them and the postal service has a reasonable service level when it comes to intact delivery of my brick.
For many people email is the only way they know of transferring files. How else is some low-level secretary going to send a file - SFTP it to a web server and email a link? Unlikely. Email is omnipresent, virtually instantaneous from the point of view of the sender and already understood by 99% of users
Because email wasn't designed to deal with large binary files. It was meant to send text back of forth between two people. Kind of like paper letters, no pictures allowed. That 500 MB file takes 667? megs in email, because of encoding constraints. Oh, and likely your network can't really handle it. If I, and every one of my coworkers downloaded 1 gig of information every time we checked our email, then, the network would slow to a crawl.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The content of a medium is another medium. The content of a web page is a book (sometimes a film) and the content of email is speech. Your pithy, useful, one-liner emails resemble a bit of conversation a lot more than they do a piece of text.
Speech is electric (it was your sig that inspired me to post here). Books are not. Books move very slow and require a committee to "get them right". Speech is autonomous, isolated, demands free action. It's like the difference between cars jammed up on a highway (or content-management) system and people zipping around on their own personal jetpacks.
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In a large (multinational) company, you're bound to have multiple collaboration systems (per region/devision/...) and at some point an integration step will be needed. Most of the time e-mail is simply good enough.
IMHO the answer is interoperability. You can use any mail client to send an email and the recipient will be able to read it regardless of the client s/he uses (and in fact you normally don't know what it is).
On the other side collaboration suites usually require that everybody uses exactly the same tool. That's maybe acceptable in an small scale environment or in a company but there are no chances that everybody will ever use exactly the same tool in the world at large.
Furthermore, email clients are free or bundled with the OS, collaboration tools are not.
Yeah, they should have called email, instant telegram instead, or personal telegram, or something along those lines. Because you can send anything through the mail. You can basically only send words through telegrams. Email is basically telegrams on computers. They were designed to send text, and that's about it. If you want to transfer big files, there's much easier ways to do it than email. I don't know about you, but I don't like waiting 1/2 hour to get an important message because some idiot sent me a 500 MB file.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It would be even more useful if it recorded what I've removed- so many times I've done it to save space and then several days later had to confirm I did actually send/receive the file.
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Collaboration is when people work on the same project. Email allows people to work on the same project from lots of different places, using whatever software they choose that can send email. The telephone is much the same.
Computer-based collaboration solutions are a supposed step up, providing nice rich environments, and theoretically removing some of the burden on other systems. However, they don't come ready-to-roll. They come as a box of tools, each of which needs configuring. Now, because users do not know what this stuff is supposed to do, or even that it exists, IT departments and/or vendors who get appointed to deploy the stuff don't get much in the way of a workable list of requirements.
Before long, you either have a dog's dinner or a white elephant. As exemplified by a solution like Lotus Notes which often ends up being used exclusively as an email client, even though email isn't its strong point.
That said, there are lots examples of successful collaborative solutions. Slashdot is collaborative, flickr is collaborative, Wikipedia is collaborative, CVS is collaborative. They are all very successful. So, I don't think it's the concept, the software or the learning curve that makes for failure. It's not the proprietaryness of them either. In fact I have seen a commercial solution work well - but it did need literally months of training and internal marketing, and was developed with extensive input from representatives from each working group and department.
My view is that failure is made simply because these solutions are imposed on a workforces that didn't ask for them by managements that, although they may know how the software works, have no good idea of how their employees work, and not much interest in finding out.