Great post by Jeff Nolan on MS Outlook and the difference between what software is built for vs. what it ends up being used for (a great product management lesson and part of the natural evolution of new products).

Big surprise to everyone – people use their email for file storage!

It is certainly not what the application was designed to do, but it is how it is used and an entire generation of workers has this ingrained in their thinking.

We see pretty consistently that over 50% of the volume (size, MB/GB) of corporate email is due to MS Office attachments. Is Sharepoint or any of a number of other collaboration servers a more efficient way to share documents and work together? Yes. Will the world use email only for the pure purpose of communication? Nope.

Email has grown organically both in usage and infrastructure over a relatively short period of time (I got my first external email address at Andersen in the mid-90s) and it is now the de facto workflow, collaboration, file sharing, document management, [insert other category of enterprise software] out there.

I have followed Jeff’s blog for some time and first met him when SAP was an investor in one of my first start-up experiences.