About a decade ago, a lot of the “experts” were telling us that e-mail was “dead”, to be replaced by fun shiny objects like social media and messaging apps.
Why didn’t that happen? In a 2013 interview with Forbes, MailChimp CEO Ben Chestnut nails it:
(Email’s) gotten stronger, in my opinion. I remember when my friends and I would email each other messages like, “Hey man, what do you want to do for lunch?” Then we’d go back and forth “I dunno, Chinese?” On and on. Instant Messenger cleaned that out of my inbox. I remember when people used to email me stupid motivational quotes or urban legends. Facebook took that out of my inbox. Friends used to email me pictures of their kids. Instagram cleaned that out of my inbox. At work, project updates would clutter my inbox, but that can get posted to intranets and Yammers, and so on. All those email killers are more like email cleaners. I’m not belittling them. It’s a noble cause. We want our inboxes clean, and we only want to hear from people or topics we truly care about.
Bingo.
http://hughcartoons.com/2016/01/02/why-didnt-email-die-off/
