Did we say e-mail was the future? What we meant was, e-mail is dead - ZT

I was just thinking about this issue when I drove back from Mammoth Mountain to bayarea. It was a 6.5 hour lonely and boring driving, so I had to think about something or ideas. One thing came into my mind was the email & IM issue. Why can't we build an application which can bridge the gap between email & IM, or "a generation gap between first-generation and second-generation Internet users"? It is the issue, and a product can bridge this gap will be a successful product.

Please read the following two articles also if you are interested about this issue.
How can I miss you if you won't go away?
e-mail is dead

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Did we say e-mail was the future? What we meant was, e-mail is dead

By JOHN MURRELL

I'm wondering whether emergency rooms around the valley are seeing a sudden surge of patients complaining of meme whiplash with concurrent cognitive dissonance today. Just yesterday, the headlines were all about Inbox 2.0 and how e-mail was a natural foundation for social networking (see "How can I miss you if you won't go away?"). Come today, we're being told e-mail is dead, or at least doomed, because the kids hardly use it anymore, preferring faster, shorter, more ephemeral forms of communication.

To which we have to say: Whoa, slow down there, bunky. Heaven knows, e-mail has its problems and there are many who, philosophically at least, would not mourn its demise. But kids are not kids forever. "Most of teenagers' interaction is social, immediate, and SMS works perfectly well in those situations," says Zoli Erdos. "However, we all enter business, get a job, etc., sooner or later, like it or not. Our communication style changes along with that -- often requiring a build-up of logical structure, sequence, or simply a written record of facts, and e-mail is vital for this type of communication." And Charlie O'Donnell adds, "I mean, I don't see ConEd, Citibank, or Sprint sending me e-bill notifications on Twitter or Facebook anytime soon, so I'd better login to my e-mail once in a while if I expect to have a reasonable credit rating."

So you can hold off on those sympathy cards. E-mail's not going away, though it may merge into some single communication control panel from which you tailor and send messages via the most appropriate channel or channels. But more importantly, don't let the whiplash effect of what Don Dodge calls "MacroMyopia" get you. "Macro-Myopia is the tendency to overestimate the short term impact of a new product or technology, and underestimate its long term implications on the marketplace, and how competitors will react," Dodge explains. "It is human nature to extrapolate the early success of a 'new thing' to world domination, and to the death of the 'old thing.' Insert any variable for 'new thing' like; Facebook, Twitter, Text Messaging, Open Source, Linux, YouTube ... and you can finish the sentence with the death of the 'old thing.' "