There is a great deal of buzz around new ways to communicate that seek to replace email as the main form of collaboration in the workplace.  From text messaging to more social approaches like blogs and RSS.  Love it or hate it, email is entrenched in the daily habits of millions of workers all over the world.  Here’s my take on why:

• Email is ubiquitous – everybody has at least one email address and, more importantly, knows how to use it.  Even more importantly, most everyone they know has an email address (reference the evolution of fax machine adoption) and knows how to use it
  
• Email is (mostly) free – in corporate environments, there is no direct cost associated with sending or receiving an email as it is a service provided by IT where the costs are more indirect (bandwidth, labor, storage, etc.).  Also, I am not including "consequence" costs like e-discovery, litigation, liability, etc.  From a web mail perspective (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) perspective, there is no cost to not only sending and receiving, but to having access.
  
• Email is trusted – there is an assumption that unless a message bounces back as undeliverable that it made it to the recipient and they have it in their Inbox.  Spam and other malicious types of messages are still out there but, while still a nuisance, most corporate messaging folks I deal with think this has been addressed (meaning no need to buy something else as what they have is "good enough")
  
• Email is formal – at its core an email is a business record in a corporate environment and a more official or serious way to communicate versus more causal means like IM
• Email is flexible – content, attachments, format, recipients, & purpose are all left in the hands of the sender to configure/customize/personalize

Fred Wilson did a post on "What Trumps Email?" that lays out a great framework for analysis.

I’m going to take a look at the other forms of communication both established and emerging and their fit as an alternative or even replacement for email in the enterprise in upcoming posts.

I thought this was pretty funny when I posted on it before.  The Washington Post is running with a story on it and, of course, has to have a counterpoint to Fred’s point.  This comes in the form of Carnegie Mellon professor David Farber who is quoted in the article as saying of Fred:

"For a venture capitalist to say something like this — he should get out of the technology field," Farber said.

Now I don’t personally know David or Fred, but I think it is fair to assume the demands on their time and the volume/urgency/content of emails varies significantly.  Fred’s triage approach is similar to mine – those that are urgent or from certain senders get my attention first.  Others including CC’s don’t get a response and, in most cases, I refuse to carry on a conversation in email

Here is Fred’s response.

Email is broken and companies and individuals are trying to figure out what to do about it.  Using new/better forms of collaboration and communication like IM, blogs, RSS, and text messaging demonstrates the type of forward thinking a venture capitalist (or anyone else) must have to understand the technologies available to address the significant pain related to email.  Companies and institutions (like CMU) can’t move as fast to try and adopt new technologies organization-wide creating the demand for products (like ours) to help manage email.  The reasons for this are many from the significant investments already made in email infrastructure to institutionalized end-user habits

Email is not going away any time soon and we all have to figure out how we will manage the increasing volume of it until something better comes along.

Good article today in the Wall Street Journal (thanks Cindy) on the use of graphics, links, and logos in email signatures.  As the one responsible for marketing/brand at this company and others, having a standard signature block (or several options as I have learned to do) for employees to use in their email signature can be an exercise in futility – even when trying to promote a link or marketing program as we do here at MessageGate.  Enforcement is difficult and it ranks pretty low on the list of priorities.  That said, there are some issues about unchecked use of these types of things.

When we first began to do our Activity Profiles, we were surprised at both the count and volume of image files causing us to implement a threshold approach to ensure the results were digestible (meaning that there were too many occurrences of .jpg and other image files to be meaningful).  There were so many images of both valid logos and random cats, flowers, and animated icons that we chose to focus only on those deemed egregiously large as a starting point.  Much like me, our customers’ policing of the signature block is part of the brand management program but hardly a priority item and can be invisible to those that are concerned with it.

This story tackles the issue of personalization and how it is moving beyond mainstream email, phone, IM, etc. details to avatars, quotes, and other such images in the name of further personalizing the message.  Maybe I am old school, but don’t really believe the bottom of a company supplied email is the place for you to champion personal causes to unsuspecting recipients or to share pictures of kitty cats doing funny things.  Mostly because, contrary to what most folks think, the email is not yours – it is a company business record and they are accountable for what is in it.  You’d be surprised how much of this exists in corporate email and what both the bandwidth and storage implications can be.  Using our threshold approach above, we see entertainment files (audio, image, video) accounting for upwards of 20% of corporate email volume (GB/TB).  Even if signatures account for just a portion of it, that’s a lot of crap to transport and store in the name of personalization.