William F. Garrity

In the December 12, 2009, Technology Quarterly  supplement to The Economist,  a piece about potential successors to email, particularly as a tool to collaborate. 

Monitor

Better ways to collaborate

Software: E-mail has severe limitations as an online collaboration tool, but it has the benefit of ubiquity. Might it be displaced by something new?

MOST people would agree that computer technology can play a valuable role in helping workers collaborate. Yet they would probably also agree that e-mail, the most widely used example of such collaborative technology, is less than ideally suited to the task. Based on protocols that were created long before the internet took its current form, e-mail continues to thrive for two reasons. It is ubiquitous: your e-mail address, being unique, functions as the internet equivalent of your name, postal address and passport, since it is commonly used to sign into websites. And it is a classic example of a “good enough” tool. It allows people to send messages to individuals or groups, to hold online discussions and to exchange documents and other files. 

But an e-mail discussion between more than a few people can quickly fill the participants’ in-boxes with a deluge of messages, making the argument hard to follow. Collaborating on a document via e-mail can also be problematic, as different versions start to circulate which must then be reconciled. “The dominant mode these days is still to put attachments on e-mails and send them around, and really, nobody is happy with that,” says Andrew McAfee, an expert on collaboration at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre for Internet & Society and the author of “Enterprise 2.0”, a book on the subject.

Yet despite recurrent complaints that “e-mail is broken”, little seems to change. Other collaboration tools have popped up in recent years—including instant messaging, blogs, wikis (web pages that users can edit), social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, web-based applications and micro-blogging services like Twitter—but none has managed to dethrone e-mail. Indeed, many of these services rely on e-mail as an underlying signalling mechanism. When someone posts a comment on your blog, sends you a message on Facebook or starts following you on Twitter, how do hear about it? You get an automated e-mail. Accordingly, people commonly use a combination of various messaging and collaboration tools, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, in both their personal and business lives.

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