Why will email never be dead?
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@Vidya said:
@Dashrender Why so?
The abuse factor is the first and foremost, but the lack of consistent security would be another. But the problem is that getting those things is nearly if not completely impossible to do for free. Considering that, the cost to move to something that provides those things will never happen on a global scale.
As a side example. biometrics will never really become a normal form of authentication. Not just because it's not really secure, but because the cost of implementation is to high.
If you want a new technology to gain real traction it has to be free or near free to the end user, and provide substantial value to the vendor to make the change.
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@Dashrender said:
The abuse factor is the first and foremost, but the lack of consistent security would be another.
Those are natural artifacts of what makes email useful, though, which is open , anonymous, ad hoc communications. The downsides of email are the downsides or regular mail, in person conversations and other traditional communication modes.
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I wouldn't consider email anonymous - at least that was not the original intent.
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@Dashrender said:
I wouldn't consider email anonymous - at least that was not the original intent.
It was always the intent that it would never require authentication and identification. The fundamental design was always anonymous.
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I have to disagree with the question - not only is email very little like it "was to start", I don't see it continuing for more than a decade before another form of more unified messaging takes it's place. What comes may look taste smell and feel like email, but the underlying foundations will have changed to be unrecognisable from current systems, let alone what they started with.
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email will certainly change and it's going in two directions. short SMS/tweet and long video unified communications. it's amazing how many people think SMS/tweets are secure and private.
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@MattSpeller said:
I have to disagree with the question - not only is email very little like it "was to start", I don't see it continuing for more than a decade before another form of more unified messaging takes it's place. What comes may look taste smell and feel like email, but the underlying foundations will have changed to be unrecognisable from current systems, let alone what they started with.
I don't expect it to change. It's lasted for about four decades already without any change. And many years ago Google thought that email was dead and tried to change it only to find that nothing really competes with email. Email, in its current form, tracks how people need email to work. No one has yet so much as proposed an alternative that doesn't involve changing the overall style of communications into something that doesn't cover the same ground as email which, obviously, might be useful but will leave email in place to fill that very large, important role.
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@MattSpeller , @scottalanmiller , I'm not sure if we can really predict the way business communication will evolve. I think that business email will not be dead, at least not for a very long time to come. Social IT (have you seen Zoho Connect ?) is evolving too, but has really not caught up like other social networks like FB, Twitter or services like Whatsapp.. Email might not exist in its present form, but I'd like to think that it would evolve into a more collaborative service and still remain an essential communication tool.
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The difference between email and essentially almost any other "platform" (such as Zoho Connect, Yammer, Facebook, SMS, etc) is that email is completely independent. You can run your own email servers, you can configure it in the way you want, you don't have to worry about others at all. Not only that, since the protocols are open, unless someone has a malconfigured email server, or doesn't have one at all, you can email them even if there's never been communication between your networks before. You cannot do this with anything else and also be independent.
That's why email will not die. It may change in small ways over time, but it will still be here. It's the universal fail over for everything else (even some providers allow text messages and voice mails to fail over/forward to email), and I can send text, images, and all types of files through it. What else meets all of these qualifications? Nothing.
The only way to really get rid of it would be to make something just as simple, just as open, just as independent, and make it reverse compatible with email -- and then we're back to the beginning, Google's tried it, doesn't work out that great.
I also cannot predict what business communication will be like in 10 - 20 years, but I guarantee email will be there, just as a technologist in the 19th century wrote "I don't know what London will look like in the 21st century, but I know it won't be that much different than now." And he was right, because the fundamentals really don't change.
The same goes for email, and unified messaging won't replace it, considering that unified messaging almost always, without exception, centers around or fails over to email.
Saying otherwise is literally no different to me than people who have said over the last 5 years that "[mobile] apps will make the web obsolete within 5 - 10 years." and in fact are still saying that. I guess it's "disruptive" to say something will be obsolete, but with many, many, many offices still using software made 15 - 20, sometimes 30 years ago, it's more than a stretch to suggest everyone will suddenly shift to one direction over the next decade.
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Hey all nice people, the result for the Zoho Mail contest is announced and can be found here:
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/786847-answer-a-question-zoho-mail-will-give-you-25-free-users-with-your-account?page=1#entry-4357247Thanks to all those who participated!
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Thanks
