Essential.
For many businesses, the killer app for introducing computers to the workplace was e-mail. Nowadays, we all take this most ubiquitous of communication methods for granted - it has supplanted telephones, regular mail, fax and even in-person meetings for many applications, and, yet, this technology hasn’t significantly changed since its birth at MIT in 1965.
If you look at almost every other aspect of electronic communication via the internet, they have all evolved at a rapid pace - the World Wide Web of 1999 looked and functioned far differently than it does now, not to mention the huge growth of instant messaging, IP telephony and social networking. So, why has e-mail stayed so resolute in its resistance to change? And what, if anything, will it evolve into?
Firstly, e-mail, and its associated protocols, is now so ubiquitous that any significant change to its functionality and capabilities would still have to cater to a huge “lowest common denominator” audience, and would require huge (meaning, in business terms, expensive) infrastructural changes. Just look at the difficulty many businesses and users have had with such a seemingly simple task as migrating away from Internet Explorer 6! E-mail facilitated the internet, it came first, and the internet is built on the foundations that were put in place for e-mail.
Secondly, it’s simple. Really simple. My 64-year-old mother can send an email, yet she knows practically nothing else about computers. Its ease of use and accessibility is probably responsible for many people buying their first computer. How else are they going to receive regular doses of unfunny jokes, amusing cat pictures and “male enhancement” pill adverts?
And thirdly, what would you upgrade it to, or replace it with? E-mail, as a technology, is showing its age. It’s not the most secure communications medium, its support for rich media is spotty, and the phenomenon of “spam” is a constant irritation. But, despite these shortcomings, for general electronic communications, nothing else is as widespread, nor works as well. Various other technologies have threatened it, most recently with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, but these are basically still niche applications, tailored to a particular method of communicating and restricted to a particular channel, and therefore not as universally useful as e-mail.
The nearest thing to a real contender that has emerged recently would be Google Wave - the best description of which would be “collaborative e-mail”, mixing the functionalities of e-mail, instant messaging, status updates and wiki-style collaborative document editing into one open platform. If Google can get traction for this technology, then traditional e-mail may have a fight on its hands, but it will be an uphill battle to make this happen. I wish them luck - if anyone can achieve this herculean task, it’s Google.
Even in this constantly changing technological world, with many early adopters of new technologies, many things are still entrenched. And e-mail is one of the most entrenched of all. Why? Well, to appropriate an Apple catchphrase, “it just works”.
