There are certain phrases I hear in startup pitches that immediately cause me to tune out. One of them is some combination of social, mobile and local. Another is "fixing emaiL" or "email is broken".
It isn't.
With all the change that's happened with the Internet two forms of communication have proven to be incredibly resilient: SMS and email.
SMS is resilient because every phone has it. It's portable and it's simple. The best effort thus far at dethroning SMS seems to be WhatsApp. Sure phone companies (particularly US phone companies) charge a ridiculous amount for SMS. It's no longer the valuable bandwidth control channel that it once was. But even so, I don't see it going away anytime soon.
The beauty of email is that it's largely decentralized. With something like Facebok, you get ads inserted into your stream, you're constantly at risk of some privacy snafu and there's always the risk the service changes in some problematic (for you) way or disappears altogether (OK, Facebook isn't going anywhere anytime soon but we've all had services we like get bought out and sunsetted).
Email addresses are mostly non-portable. You can have your own domain and have a portable address but most people don't. Just like a phone number has limited portability (eg only within the same country).
Changing phone numbers and email addresses seems to be an infrequent enough occurrence for most people that they don't really care about it (as a whole).
Certain services provide useful value-adds to email. Spam filtering on GMail is a prime example. There are ads on the Web UI but hey you don't have to use it (there are POP3/IMAP interfaces) and they aren't that offensive (as, say, Facebook ads are).
The fundamental use case of both SMS and email is one person sending a message to another person. Think of this like IP (the protocol). People find each other with contacts. Think of this like DNS (kinda).
Every "email killer" I've seen has made this most important use case harder or just more complicated and, more to the point, for this use case provides no tangible benefits (that anyone cares about).
And in all cases you're giving up the decentralized nature of email so someone has control over your messages and your experience. Why would anyone make that tradeoff? It doesn't make any sense.
So forever? Well that's tough to argue. But for a really long time? Sure, absolutely.
The "fixing email" / "email is broken" are quotes you only hear from startup guys and UX geeks. Email is indeed working really well. Most people outside of this niche seems to have no fundamental problems with it.
Just an example: I recently needed to send a script to an 8 year old kid and a grandma at around 75. Couldn't have done it any other way than email. The point being that email is an enormously broad platform.
Its so broad that the second you turn to mobile to solve email, you have limited your way out the competition.
It isn't.
With all the change that's happened with the Internet two forms of communication have proven to be incredibly resilient: SMS and email.
SMS is resilient because every phone has it. It's portable and it's simple. The best effort thus far at dethroning SMS seems to be WhatsApp. Sure phone companies (particularly US phone companies) charge a ridiculous amount for SMS. It's no longer the valuable bandwidth control channel that it once was. But even so, I don't see it going away anytime soon.
The beauty of email is that it's largely decentralized. With something like Facebok, you get ads inserted into your stream, you're constantly at risk of some privacy snafu and there's always the risk the service changes in some problematic (for you) way or disappears altogether (OK, Facebook isn't going anywhere anytime soon but we've all had services we like get bought out and sunsetted).
Email addresses are mostly non-portable. You can have your own domain and have a portable address but most people don't. Just like a phone number has limited portability (eg only within the same country).
Changing phone numbers and email addresses seems to be an infrequent enough occurrence for most people that they don't really care about it (as a whole).
Certain services provide useful value-adds to email. Spam filtering on GMail is a prime example. There are ads on the Web UI but hey you don't have to use it (there are POP3/IMAP interfaces) and they aren't that offensive (as, say, Facebook ads are).
The fundamental use case of both SMS and email is one person sending a message to another person. Think of this like IP (the protocol). People find each other with contacts. Think of this like DNS (kinda).
Every "email killer" I've seen has made this most important use case harder or just more complicated and, more to the point, for this use case provides no tangible benefits (that anyone cares about).
And in all cases you're giving up the decentralized nature of email so someone has control over your messages and your experience. Why would anyone make that tradeoff? It doesn't make any sense.
So forever? Well that's tough to argue. But for a really long time? Sure, absolutely.