Email Abdicates Its Throne

In April and May, I conducted a quick poll  -- asking "What media do you use? Multiple answers allowed." The 444 responses broke out as follows:

My Web site readership is composed primarily of enterprise knowledge workers. A quick analysis of the responses shows that email continues to be the predominant means of e-communications -- however, "by a nose." (With the exception of Twitter, other one-to-many types of e-communication, e.g., blogs and Web conferencing, were not part of the poll). Not surprisingly, people are increasingly using multiple forms of e-communications. However, I'd bet that each communication media is used independently. The greater the number of e-communication media being used, the greater the risk for information overload.

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Tech Test: Twitter.com Informs, Overwhelms  Associated Press - (APTN) Apr. 11, 2007. 01:48 PM EST.

I'm typing this blog post from INBOX 2007. Jeff Ressler of Microsoft delivered this morning's keynote on unified communications (UC). UC pulls the various types of e-communications into one messaging stream. To the user, silos are gone.

Today, UC is marketing buzz within the "average" enterprise -- which is earnestly watching the early adopter, UC-enabled enterprises.

To be clear, email messaging is not going away. Rather, increasingly it is being augmented by other, synergistic types of messaging (some text, some voice, some visual... ). Email is abdicating its throne in favor of becoming a member of the e-communications community -- a key member with a rich history, but still a member.

I'll be blogging my commentary this week from INBOX.