Are you or are you not sick and tired about the current most popolar method of global communication? Is it not ineffective, time consuming, error-prone, hard to manage and after all to fast to cope? Yes I am talking about emails.
And yes eventually Emails will be gone!!
We will have to get used to new communication tools that enable us to work more efficiently on our daily projects. Emails will not vanish but will have to be cut back to what they were in the beginnings of the digital world: A digital letter. Projectbased communication via email is a waste of time and resources however it is difficult to eradicate.
I found the below article from Lisa DiCarlo in forbes.com. It was written in July 2005, so you can tell the problem is not new but for me personally the situation is getting worse.
NEW YORK - Earlier this week I was reminded of the opening lines of the popular 1980s Whitney Houston song "The Greatest Love of All," which declared that "children are the future" and that adults should "teach them well and let them lead the way."
If that's true, then e-mail may be at the beginning of a long, slow decline in usage. According to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life project, barely 5% of American teens aged 12 to 17 prefer e-mail over instant messaging as their digital communications method of choice. Teens view e-mail as a way to talk to "old people" or institutions like companies. Kids, it seems, prefer the immediacy and mobility of instant messaging and text messaging to e-mail, which they might some day refer to as snail mail, the same way most people over 30 refer to the U.S. Postal Service.
Pew reports that some teens have as many as seven screen names to accommodate their enormous IM buddy lists, which typically limit users to 200 names. Why does any of this matter? Why should you care how kids spend their parents' dough? Well, like Whitney says, these kids are the future and they're leading the way. American teens, an astonishing 87% of whom are online, are what's helping drive the consumer electronics industry, including development of new products. Witness the Walt Disney Co.'s (nyse: DIS - news - people ) foray into the kiddie-cell phone business with Sprint (nyse: FON - news - people ).
Further, millions of today's teens will become tomorrow's white-collar workforce. What they are used to using and prefer to use today will carry over to corporate America in the next decade. As the younger digital generation infiltrates the workforce they will take their preferences with them. They will set the technology agenda. That's not to say that e-mail use is dropping. It is still the most popular Internet application. According to the Radicati Group, over 130 billion e-mail messages will be transmitted worldwide every day this year. That number should more than double to 276 billion in 2009.
Corporate users and consumers will swap 14 billion IMs per day worldwide this year, a figure that Radicati expects will more than triple to 46.5 billion by 2009. The number of free public IM accounts will grow to 1.1 billion in 2009 from 816 million today, while corporate IM accounts will more than double to 126 million in that time frame. Pew says that 89% of Internet users use e-mail daily, about the same percentage as 2000, but that the "popularity of e-mail and intensity of its use is waning" in favor of IM. For corporate users, IM might provide a good alternative to e-mail. The scourge of spam and viruses have not yet hijacked IM services as they have e-mail systems like Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) Outlook.
Further, so-called "presence" technology, which lets users know when and if you are available, are becoming an increasingly valuable business tool. Businesses "see the value of IM and are giving in to users' demands for it," says Teney Takahashi of the Radicati Group. On top of that, Microsoft itself may be helping to marginalize e-mail with the upcoming version of Office. It lets teams of people work together in real time on documents, which bypasses the need for e-mail altogether. It's not likely that IM will ever replace e-mail, simply because the latter is such an ingrained part of daily business life and because the lack of IM standards and protocols inhibit interoperability between different systems. But there's no denying where the momentum is. Just look to the children.
