Exchange Email, News and announcements, Other providers
Slack’s investment won’t bring email’s demise
Slack recently announced an investment of $1.9M into 11 startups with the aim of further growing its ecosystem. This brings Slack’s total investment into the 600 apps within its overall directory to approximately $80M.
While it’s great to see collaboration companies, like Slack, working to further expand their capabilities, any significant changes to the way we utilize business email are likely to be slow going. Why? Our CTO, Jonathan Levine, shares his thoughts:
“These new tools aren’t driving users away from email. How could they when the core features of these tools so often rely on it? For instance, Slack will notify you via email when there’s a message awaiting your attention. It’s the infrastructure foundation upon which other technologies are built. The benefits of these so-called ’email killers’ are often specific to certain tasks like internal team communication in this case. Email continues to thrive because it’s exactly the opposite – communication’s jack of all trades.”
While the future of work is changing fast, email has already established a 40-year-old ecosystem of many times more than the 600 add-on applications that Slack has included. In many cases, these new collaboration and productivity tools emerge faster than people can grasp how to best incorporate them into their workday. Since email has unique properties that no other new technology possesses, it will continue to serve as communication’s foundation.
When I asked Jonathan what he would say to someone who says “email is dead”, he first responded with an ever so slight smile across his face, “They would probably be sending me the question via email…”
You can’t kill email
Check out Jonathan’s TechCrunch article “You Can’t Kill Email” for more on the future of workplace communications.
If you’re considering moving your email to the cloud, check out Intermedia’s Exchange service, or give us a call at 800-379-7729 to speak to one of our experts.
