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A few days ago we went through a fictional world where tech giants had a business model without online advertising, which is currently, with email, one of the things that still beats any kind of innovation. The electronic email has almost a fifty years history and still no one has been able to replace it. It’s remarkable to see how a concept, that anyone can develop, can keep up against innovation and time. Email is probably one of the few things that hasn’t been replaced by any modern technology.
We have seen a few attempts from startups whose aim was to completely change the experience, but most of them were unsuccessful. The main reason is that email is used for everything and so, if we are trying to replace it, we need to aim at a specific usage. Private messaging has partially taken a slice of this “usage”, because it’s easier to send a quick message to a friend through Whatsapp, rather than send an email. This also works with intimate colleagues in the workspace.
In the same way, the extensive use of Facebook, but even Twitter, has taken another slice of the email’s market. People are able to interact quicker through a Facebook chat or a message on someone’s wall, than write a long and boring email. Twitter and any other social media has been replacing what email was used for in the past, for the last years.
Twenty years ago, if you had to send a file to a friend, you had to attach it to an email and then send it. Likewise, if you wanted to move a file from a computer to another, quickly, there were people who used to attach the file and send it to their own inbox. This was the problem that Drew Houston noticed and that’s why he founded Dropbox, which took another slice of the email’s market. Nowadays, everything is on the cloud, perfectly synced with our devices.
If ten years ago we were forced to sign up to every website through our email address, we don’t have that need anymore. Facebook, Twitter and even Github have made our lives easier by letting us signing to websites through our social data. While we were forced to complete a five steps passage before getting into a website, ten years later, we don’t have that problem anymore.
In the past years, the email’s market has shrunk because people have found new creative ways to replace what the email was doing for us. If email was everything for us twenty years ago, todays it doesn’t have that role. Although email is not used for everything anymore, it’s still huge in terms of usage and ways of using it. From University applications to workspaces, email is something we all share by also having more than one single address.
It’s true to say that the market has shrunk, but not enough, because this service is still standing supported by every tech giants such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Even though these companies have the ability to replace it completely, they still stick to the technology we invented five decades ago, but keep improving the service by adding more features.
In the next years, nothing will attack email directly, but there will be companies that will try to replace it in specific sectors, starting from the enterprise one. There are thousands of people who receive five hundred emails a day from their colleagues and it’s time to solve that problem by finding a good way to either show them all quickly or move to a complete different service. On the other hand, for job applications, newsletters, info and communications, email will still stand for the next decades.
It’s not about the willingness of replacing it, but more about what those three tech giants want to do.
