Slashdot Mirror
Yes, You've Still Got Mail (recode.net)
Veteran technology columnist Walt Mossberg, writes: Like radio, email isn't dying, it's just changing. Over the past decade or so it's become much more like postal mail. It's not the place you expect to find a greeting from a friend or even a timely update from a professional colleague. Instead, it's a mix of junk mail you hate and discard, plus bills and missives from businesses you also hate but can't discard. [...] Still, despite all signs to the contrary -- and many predictions -- email is not dead. In fact, some analyses suggest that it's growing. Few people can afford to be without it. It hasn't expired; it has morphed. There are lots of reasons email persists, even as faster and simpler forms of communication proliferate and your personal communications likely have mostly migrated elsewhere. But one big one is that new types of media channels rarely totally kill off old ones, even though everyone predicts they will. The old ones just adapt and change. Back in the day, television was supposed to kill off radio, but radio gradually saved itself by dropping the programming TV did better (like dramas and variety shows) and starting to focus on playing hit songs and hosting political and sports talk shows. I think something similar is going on with email. Once the king of digital discourse, email has surely been dethroned by an army of alternatives: Vast and numerous messaging services; photo- and video-oriented sharing on social networks or the photo apps of Apple and Google; business tools like Slack. I get the latest pictures of my granddaughter through iCloud photo sharing. I get the latest discussions of how we plan to cover stories on The Verge or Recode through Slack. My editor and I collaboratively edit my stories inside Google Docs. Ten years ago, all those things would have been done via email. Back then, when a reader wanted to tell me I was an idiot (or worse) for something I wrote, I got an email. Now, they tell me on Twitter.
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The reason why email isn't dying is that it is general purpose and enduring, and does not seem to require to the latest internet fad app in order to work.
How many Slashdotters have ever believed email was dying?
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
...there were only grunts and gestures
Then there were single syllable words naming things
Then came a real language allowing the exchanging of information.
Then came pictures, symbolizing information
Then came the written word
Then came Paper, allowing anyone to write.
Then came Printing, spreading written material all over the world.
Then came Computers, digitizing pictures and words and making vast sums of knowledge searchable.
Then came email, allow the communication of that knowledge in a timely and logical manner
Then came social media with crude editors and un-intuitive interfaces
Then came Twitter with a 140 character limit.
Then came emojiis, replacing the written word with pictures.
Next will be digitized grunts and gestures.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
That's another huge advantage of email: businesses can run their own email servers, ensure that their internal communication never leaves the premises and isn't harvested by the likes of Google, be in control of account creation and naming, apply any other policies they deem necessary, while still ensuring that anyone in the world can contact them using their choice of email client or service.
That's how email was designed, as opposed to all those others that are proprietary and locked down cloud services. And any smart company using those will ask themselves: "what do we do when this service goes tits up?". If the service is proprietary and is your primary internal and external communication channel, then there are no pretty answers to that.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...