E-mail was never designed for most of today’s purposes, yet it is the internet’s most enduring “killer application”. We can’t live without it, but we can’t manage it either. What are the alternatives, and why aren’t we using them yet?
In 2003 researchers at Xerox PARC observed staff in three organisations and noticed it had become the “habitat” of choice for most knowledge workers, who used it as their main tool for scheduling, collaborating, and transferring files. They concluded it was so overloaded and so widely co-opted for inappropriate uses that “serial-killer application” would be a better description.
It is hard to believe, but it is almost 40 years old. Unsurprisingly it has shortcomings: spam, security, archiving and asynchronicity being just a few. Yet it is still the tool most people use to communicate and collaborate at work. For its billion or more users, part of its enduring attraction is its flexibility and informality, says Nikos Drakos, a research director at Gartner, the IT research group. “People can use e-mail to reach anyone. When they’re making it available, they have a degree of control that says ‘I will only make it available to you and you’ – it’s a kind of access control mechanism. And it’s semi-private.”
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