The future of e-mail
Every so often, e-mail – a technology some decades old – is declared dead, redundant, or in decline as newer forms of text-based communication rise in popularity. Just last year (2010) Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg declared that “e-mail … is probably going away.”
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, followed up later in the year with the launch of the new Facebook Messages system which added e-mail, instant messaging and SMS support.
Even though the new system would allow users to have an “@facebook.com” e-mail address, Zuckerberg said that it isn’t e-mail, nor a Gmail killer.
E-mail is hardly dead or dying
When people talk about the death of e-mail they’re usually thinking of a narrow definition of the technology, said Nathaniel Borenstein, chief scientist at Mimecast, and co-creator of the MIME standard used all over the Internet, including e-mail.
People tend to think of e-mail in terms of the older SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) technology, Borenstein said. However, things have arguably already moved away from SMTP with webmail.
Borenstein explained that e-mail didn’t mean SMTP at all further back – it meant messaging from one user account to another and it used to be able to transmit messages across different protocols.
According to Borenstein, the fact is that the numbers don’t agree with the statement “e-mail is dead.” It is still growing, albeit not as fast as social networking.
“As long as there are multiple platforms in the world,” Borenstein said “you’re going to need the stuff after the ‘at’ symbol.”
Teenage trends pointing to the future?
One of the things Sandberg said in her presentation predicting the end of e-mail was that “in consumer technology, if we want to know what people like us will be doing tomorrow, we look at what teenagers are doing today.”
She revealed a statistic that said only 11% of teenagers check their e-mail daily, preferring SMS and social networking over the more formal electronic letter.
However, Borenstein said that it is misleading to look at statistics about what young people are doing because they are pack animals. If all your friends are on Facebook, as a teenager, you’ll use it too. Young people also don’t mind being in a closed system, Borenstein said.
“When you join a company, though, you’ll use their company e-mail system,” Borenstein said.
Cloud e-mail may pose a monopoly risk
A trend in both consumer and enterprise e-mail is to make use of cloud services rather than running ones own mail servers. Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail are all popular choices for individuals and the primary user interface of these services is web-based.
Web-based mail services are hardly new, but Borenstein said he is concerned that consolidation is going to be easier for cloud providers than others and, to his mind, can happen really fast.
Borenstein said that he is also worried that the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standards process, “the process that gave us the Internet,” he expanded, becomes too slow for business.
The process is of such a nature that anyone with a well-expressed opinion will get a hearing, Borenstein explained. There is no doubt that it is slower than a monolithic decision process, Borenstein said, but it also achieves better results for the time it takes.
Just how great a danger does a slow standards process compounded with an increasing trend in hosting e-mail services “in the cloud” pose? “Up to a certain point there’s no danger to do email in the cloud because there’s a lot of interoperation. Service providers need an open protocol,” Borenstein said.
There is some level of market-share, which Borenstein pegs at around 80%, where companies don’t have to worry about standards anymore.
“There is a strong potential danger there,” Borenstein said. As an example, Borenstein mentioned Microsoft, which he says doesn’t have to worry about certain types of compatibility. “Not that I see it happening this year or next, but if it happens, it will happen quickly,” Borenstein added.
Borenstein said that he is optimistic that Google and Microsoft will continue to compete for some time, but added, “We have seen how easily the mighty fall.”
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