OK, so I am really comfortable with email. I have been an Outlook user since I beta’d the first office suites when I was at Microsoft with the Office 1997 version.
So here we are more than ten years later and I still prefer it over all the other tools I have tried and abandoned.
Now its Office 2010 beta. It’s pretty useful and has some nice new features.
I thought that Office 2007 was a major upgrade and so far to me while there are nice new features 2010 is not as ground breaking.
I have tried to use the free tools like Google Docs and Open Office. I even went cold turkey for a week – well that lasted two days before I returned to the fold.
I do like Office for the Mac 2008. It has nice features. I may yet cross over to the dark side in the next year and go to the Mac. My old G3 Mac no longer functions for anything but the minimalist of tasks.
So, it would seem I am not alone. I recently saw an interesting study courtesy of eMarketer.
The survey shows that the primary source of content sharing is email. I believe this to be so for people like me.
However it is no longer the unique source of my information sharing services. This year – my Christmas greeting will be via Facebook, Twitter and my blog [here it is].
My private email users will get the email I usually do and if your one of the (un)lucky people a Christmas Greeting is probably due to you in the next 24 hours.
I have a quite a few friends who have moved their primary social interaction tool to Facebook. [So far I have yet to find someone who communicates exclusively via Twitter and I really hope I don’t!].
I have also noticed a trend among professional people who have abandoned their use of Facebook for personal stuff.
The ability to control personal vs professional remains a challenge for the Big Kahuna of social media. And its not getting any better. So despite the new privacy rules I have now essentially withdrawn my personal info from FB as well.
I never liked the phone and still don’t. So my usage – as measured in total minutes over the past decade has fallen dramatically. However my digital volume of email as measured in the respective growth of my PST files has accelerated.
Email has clearly evolved. I still get way too much and I am struggling to keep up. I need to revisit my filters again.
I have unsubscribed to a wide variety of newsletters in the past year. I seldom have time to read RSS feeds – again there is just too much data out there. I have found that the tools are getting better. Two of my favorite Outlook Add-ins are:
I highly recommend both, however the latter is still unstable in Office2007 and will likely be so in 2010 although so far it does suffer from some annoying mis-features such as the occupation of valuable real estate on the screen and some inframe nav issues.
So for now I will continue to use email as my primary communication tool. Am I a Luddite, I don’t think so – but you might disagree.
About Timothy O'Neil-Dunne
You, a luddite Tim! Who could ever accuse an ex-Microsoftie of that?
Email works – everyone has it, you don’t have to bother thinking about HOW to get to somebody, you just know it will; it is easy to choose the breadth of audience reasonably well.
You are right – there is just too much information and too many interrupts and, for all the attempts to provide tools that consolidate them, too many places to make your intellectual gems known.
Let’s remain grumpy e-mail users!
Luddite Tim- what a concept, yes! Must admit I am a sucker for trying out shiny new web tools that I sign-up for and then often abandon again after a few tries. I agree with the premise that email remains the most efficient communications tool. By now it sure passes the grandmother test. After having installed Windows 7 on my Mac – yes, with Parallels that’s possible – I have taken Office 2010 beta for a brief spin and must say that Outlook does have a number of useful features I could get used to again after not using it for years. Hear that it will be part of the next Office for Mac 2010 (the bright side, Tim!). Till then, GMail in the browser will probably remain the go to tool.
My beef with email is that it is no longer – maybe never was – the ideal collaboration tool. The endless back and forth of messages with attachments just doesn’t do the trick. This is where I have hopes for tools like Google Wave to become more useful with real-time info and data exchange capabilities. Not for the average grandmother yet, but who knows. Tim could certainly use it, I’m sure.
I agree with both David and Joe. Email just works and (almost) everyone has an email account. I recently needed to share some data with my daughter’s doctor so I asked her if I could just invite her to a Google doc I had prepared. She had no idea what I was talking about, but she did have an email, so I downloaded the Google doc as an Excel spreadsheet and emailed it to her. Voila.
Oh and I don’t think it is going to go away, I think it will evolve into something else. But like all good evolutions, it will happen at a pace in keeping with changes in behaviour rather than what the technology is capable of doing.
Stephen – you are so right that the evolutionary change of behaviours is the controlling force – that and the “lowest common denominator” effect. As your example points out it only needs one person NOT to use the “better” tool and the default is email. I’ve always been a fan of more collaborative tools but have now come to accept that for most people there is just no compelling case forf putting in the effort required to become comfortbale using them. What will change that? I really do not know – certainly not just the arrival of a new technology tool.
Tim, so few people have been saying this recently, as everyone always talks about how many Twitter followers a travel company has. When Twitter is used solely as a one way medium to distribute special offers, I fail to see how it is an improvement over email. So whilst it may seem mundane, email definitely gets the job done. And it is even more reliable (albeit slower)on my BlackBerry than SMS, as occasionally when roaming the SMS gets lost somewhere. I can’t see myself replacing email with any over hyped new technology anytime soon.