Entertaining post via Brad Feld on what lurks between the lines in our emails. Here’s the link.

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.