What Would a Post-Email World Look Like?

jfruh writes "Pundits have been gleefully predicting the death of email for years, but nobody has really been able to explain what will replace email, especially for the medium's archiving capabilities that businesses and governments have come to rely on. It's possible that email won't vanish, but rather become invisible, one component of an integrated communication stream that will be transparent to users but still present — and useful — under the hood. It may turn out that Google's Wave, which was built on this idea, was just a bit ahead of its time."

Re:If my work inbox is any indication...

[Anonymous Coward]

In most organizations, the whole email reply chain exists so that workerbees can summon the higher authorities. "I'm gunna cc: my boss!" "Now you've done it, I'm cc:ing my boss' boss!". The bosses can then digest the conversation and come to a decision at their leisure. I have no idea how that would work with a chat/IM system.

We've had good luck using Basecamp; it is essentially email except with a web interface to locate previous conversations, documents, etc.

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Re:If my work inbox is any indication...

[hobarrera]

With more and more servers and clients every day, broken ones tend to die faster. Except huge corporate sponsored ones (yes, I'm looking at you, Outlook!).
In any case, if something DID replace email someday, you'd still have broken implementations, and many of the same issues. Maybe phishing may fade, though phising is really a user/educational problem, unrelated to the protocol.

Paperless Office

[ZombieBraintrust]

Paperless Offices work great. I have worked in one for 6 years. I print one document out a year that I then sign and fax to my consulting firms HR department. The client is an insurance company. The really experienced people bring out photos of what the place looked like before they stated going paperless some 15 to 20 years ago. Desks after desk covered in folders filled with paper. They would show us conference rooms that used to be storage for filing cabinets. The place was dirty with paper. Paperless for an insurance company means the following. When you buy insurance from an agent the agent types your info into a computer. When you get in a accident the claim handler pulls up that information and adds more information to the database. At no point is any paper produced internally. Paper leaves the company in the form of bills, policy documents, and ads. Paper comes in the system via mail from police departments, vendors, and policy holders. This paper is given to a data entry person and inputted into the database. It may get scanned. If the company is not legally required to hang on to it the paper is trashed. This is what paperless office means.

Re:Well

[garcia]

My buddy works in a factory that makes furniture. Guess what? They prefer iPads to the old notepads. It has reduced duplication of effort and sped up the entire workflow process by automating it. No need to wait until your floor check run (two or more hours) is over before heading back into the offices to get the data entered. It's all done from the floor.

Keep on trying to live out the old style. If it's not broke, fix it anyway because there's a much better way.

YMMV.