I'm explicitly questioning "people still use them as primary means of communication"
Really? Even internal company phone systems have largely switched over to walled garden voip or videocalling systems in most places I've seen. Nobody calls anybody any more - the only use of phones I see is for dialling in to conference bridges. Email is used internally within businesses.
What do people really still use public phones and email for?
On a more personal note, I grew up using messenger protocols, icq, aim and yim. Now, I'd use a multi-protocol client, which is a little like federation, but now that doing this is inconvenient? SMS has almost entirely taken over the role of instant messaging in my life.
It's interesting, because I always felt that a SMS was way more 'urgent' than an instant message over AIM, but... most of the adults in my social circle, even those I knew from back when we all used AIM, no longer are on any instant messenger services. They have sms (often, but not always through imessage) and they have email. Then they are on their various social networks, but everyone I know checks email more often than their social network accounts.
>What do people really still use public phones and email for?
My impression is that inter-company communications all go over email and public phone. Intra-company,of course, you use the company's walled garden, if the company is large enough to dream of forcing the world into their garden (as most of the companies I've worked for lately have been.) but even so, interviewing is conducted through public phone systems. In fact, even when I'm interviewing a candidate on behalf of my current employer, half the time the connection between the internal walled garden voice system and POTS is so bad I end up using my personal cellphone. Silicon valley companies are serious about 'dogfooding' to the point where actually doing your job sometimes feels like a secondary concern. Smaller players tend to use existing technologies, and so more often use federated systems.
I have worked at smaller places, earlier in my career; I've even setup VOIP for one of those places, but it was still terminated to a POTS T1; it just used SIP lines and asterisk rather than a wired PBX, and they mostly used public email (I mean, their own email server, but it was federated email) - those are still federated systems.
I'm currently considering going to college; today, I scheduled a bunch of academic stuff, using the phone and email. If I end up locking myself into an institution, of course, then we will probably switch to using their walled garden, because they will have the power to force me to do so, but until that happens? we're communicating via federated systems.
Whenever I'm scheduling a medical appointment outside of my primary hmo? I use the phone.
My impression is that the walled gardens are mostly used in places where the relationship has been established, and one party is big enough to have built a walled garden system, and important enough to force the other party to eat the dogfood in question. Within my primary HMO, I use the proprietary 'secure messaging' application to communicate with my doctor. Within the company, I use the company's messaging system and screen sharing system.
My own conclusion is that forcing you to login and use my communications system is a power move; everyone is still dreaming of replacing email with something more profitable.
Really? Even internal company phone systems have largely switched over to walled garden voip or videocalling systems in most places I've seen. Nobody calls anybody any more - the only use of phones I see is for dialling in to conference bridges. Email is used internally within businesses.
What do people really still use public phones and email for?