Emails Gone

I’m not seriously probing of course, because the point I’m trying to make is that you read it this morning – as opposed to a few minutes ago. Except if you’re a Blackberry user, then it might have been three days ago. My latest phone, a Motorola Droid RAZR, also gets push e-mail en so did my previous Nokia E72 (did you notice that BB?), so getting an electronic mail on your mobile device is nothing new. That is not the point.

The point is that you probably update or check your Facebook or Instant Messaging far more frequently, with far more urgency, than your e-mail. Or your snail-mail for that matter.

A few months ago I wrote to some friends and said that e-mail was beginning to slow down, that it is becoming far less important. I don’t think they understood what I said because they just shrugged it off. Perhaps they are a little older – it is a known fact that children today have an e-mail address for one purpose only: To talk to their parents. The youngsters have already made the transition and is already on the new platforms.

I never said that we will stop using e-mail. Like IBM Mainframes, they will never really die. But they will become surrounded and supported and served by other more agile and more friendly systems. E-mail, like snail-mail, will always be with us. Once a day, or when we get to it. On our desktop computers. In the mornings when we check for e-mails.

But new information, the stuff that makes our world turn – appointments, news, business, transactions – will be carried over a different medium and delivered to new much more mobile devices that you carry in your pocket.

I will make a bet with you: Very soon, perhaps in less than 6 months, mobile transactional computing will overtake traditional communications. Wanna bet?

But before you make the bet, maybe you should quickly read the article Email heads for the bin by Adam Sherwin [click here]. Fascinating.