In 2010, a report by Comscore found that email use among US teens had dropped 59 per cent. No wonder that many people, like tech journalist John Brandon, writing on Inc.com in 2015, thought that email would be “obsolete by 2020”. Obviously, that hasn’t happened. And many of the teens from that report, who are now adults, are probably working in offices and using email on a daily basis.
Not only is email still here, it’s still growing. The global number of active email users is over four billion and expected to be about 4.6 billion by 2025. Email is the workhorse of business communication in most organizations — not sexy but practical, usually reliable, without using a lot of bandwidth.
That said, email is not loved. The Washington Post called it “the dirty laundry of the internet” — a time-consuming burden in the lives of employees. With all the spam, unimportant messages and tedious social-media notifications, many people say trying to reach “inbox zero” is a significant source of stress. Also, certain inefficiencies have become clear — such as how incoming emails distract employees from their work dozens of times a day.
What are the alternatives?
If everyone hates email, why are we still using it? Could any of the alternatives really replace it? Despite the problems, it is hard to imagine working effectively without email. Collaboration apps, like Slack and Teams, are becoming increasingly important in business communication. They offer useful ways to customize communication across channels and they help people work together.
These tools haven’t displaced email yet, but they might one day — at least to some extent. Tamar Yehoshua, Slack’s chief product officer, told The Verge: “We’re not going to be a substitute for everything that happens in email, but we do see that when corporations move to using Slack wall-to-wall, there’s a significant reduction of email within their corporation.”
Different cultures have different habits
In some countries, apps are already more dominant than email. Many Chinese and other Asian professionals, for example, use WeChat for business communication, even with clients. WeChat is a mobile or desktop app that’s like a combination of Twitter, WhatsApp and others. You can make a business lunch reservation, arrange the time and place with your client, keep your boss informed, boast to your friends about the deal you’ve just landed and pay the restaurant bill — all in the same app.
As Asia is so important for growth and innovation, could their way of doing business catch on over here? Given the privacy and security concerns that are prevalent in the West, it’s not likely to happen soon. What’s more, WeChat has the disadvantage of making everyone available all the time. Despite the app’s usefulness, many people will be reluctant to use a communication tool that follows them everywhere.
Surely, one day, something better will come along. But if email is going to die, it’s likely to be a slow death. Like it or not, we are going to be chained to our inboxes for a while yet.