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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.
Am I the next master of the obvious?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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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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.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
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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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
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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