

E-mail is no more efficient than the telephone or the postal service (1985) - scg
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/09/business/the-executive-computer-when-technology-outpaces-needs.html?scp=7&sq=e-mail&st=nyt&pagewanted=2

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ghshephard
The article, of course, is discussing email as it existed in 1985 - where it
indeed did suck. In fact, even in 1993, It was still pretty much impossible to
send email to someone and be certain they could receive it. Heck, I'm prepared
to suggest that even in 2000, (15 years later) you couldn't be certain that
the person you were talking with had an Email address.

Today, though, I would suggest that the vast majority of people in North
America have an Email Address.

Where the article really goes awry is in this paragraph:

"Chances are that before a universal e-mail network is ever developed, the
whole idea of electronic mail, along with those of teletext and videotex, will
have been reduced to the span of a few specialized applications. As a general
means of information exchange, the concepts are technologically intriguing.
But they are economically naive and, more importantly, no more convenient than
the existing alternatives. "

Bold prediction, but absolutely, totally, incontrovertibly - wrong.

~~~
Tichy
I couple of years ago I actually gave up on spam and decided to rely on the
Thunderbird spam filter.

That implies that email is no longer a reliable way to contact me, because of
possible false positives :-( I suspect I am not alone with that problem. GMail
seems to have false positives, too.

So email was fine for a while, but it is not anymore. Unfortunately I don't
know what to replace it with.

~~~
almost
Letters also get lost. No system is 100% reliable.

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panthera
There's a very good comparable from present day.

It's SMS.

[http://www.ctia.org/consumer_info/service/index.cfm/AID/1032...](http://www.ctia.org/consumer_info/service/index.cfm/AID/10323)

SMS volume in the US spiked after interoperability between carriers became a
reality from 2003 - 2005.

Prior to 2003, Europeans and Asians turned their noses down at their American
counterparts because "Americans just didn't text."

From here:

[http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-06-02-text-me-
main_x....](http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-06-02-text-me-main_x.htm)

At the time, only "12% of cell phone users in the USA send or receive text
messages."

And from recent times:

[http://articles.latimes.com/2009/dec/16/nation/la-na-
census-...](http://articles.latimes.com/2009/dec/16/nation/la-na-census-
texting16-2009dec16)

------
harshpotatoes
I think each form of communicating has found its niche. For many things the
phone is still the fastest way to get pieces of information, far faster than
email or browsing a website. It is especially useful if I don't know what
information I'm looking for, and have to bounce a lot of questions back and
forth. Of course the phone carries it's own nuances, such as a certain
importance to my questions. If I needed to talk to somebody important, I might
email them instead, or just call a number I know will go to voicemail to wait
for them to have to have free time.

Email is nice if I dont really want to talk, or if I need a long response/am
speaking of something complicated, or if I don't care when my question is
answered.

In short:if you need speed, use a phone and talk to somebody alive, if you
have something low priority email is good, and I think the postal service is
really good for things which absolutely must be read (invitations/legal
documents/bills).

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phamilton
As odd as it may sound, the problems discussed in the article were in great
part solved by AOL. As annoying as it might have been then, and as laughable
as it is now, AOL played an important part in getting the masses into the
email world. The business sector may have been different, but email in the
social world grew through AOL.

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swombat
And indeed, the continued existence and use of both the telephone and the
postal service demonstrate in an unarguable way that email is not "more
efficient" - it's just different.

Email, telephone and the postal service are three different modes of
communication, each of which is useful for a specific category of
communication. To that list, I'd add Twitter, IM, IRC, online
forums/BBs/newsgroups, social news sites, talking in person, having a meeting,
sleeping together, having a fight, having a meal, going out drinking, etc.

Each of those modes of communication is appropriate in a specific set of
circumstances for a specific type of communication. None of them is "more
efficient" in an absolute sense. It depends on the context.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
Which makes me think of a debate that was going on around 1994. It was Gopher
versus the World Wide Web. The two are complementary it was said.

I think email and traditional letters are not complementary. The overlap is
almost 100%. The only thing that keeps the paper letter alive is the lack of
ubiquitous and legally binding electronic identity and signature. It's not
alive because it is more convenient or a different mode of communication.

Package delivery is obviously a very different case because it's not
information that is transferred.

~~~
swombat
Letters are still useful for certain kinds of communication. Romantic love
emails just don't cut it, for example.

I'll grant you that there is some overlap between email and written letters,
though. However, the postal service carries all sorts of things, not just
letters.

------
ars
He does have a point about the incompatible systems. It was only when they all
started to speak SMTP that email really started, and it was only when they
gave up on their individual implementations, and spoke only SMTP, that email
really took off.

~~~
wmf
What's surprising to me is that this problem was identified in 1985 (or
earlier), yet the industry didn't solve it for a decade or so.

~~~
rbanffy
IIRC it was solved. It only took very long for the big players in the industry
to adopt the solution.

~~~
rbanffy
MTP (RFC 772) was published in 1980. SMTP (RFC 788) is from late 81. UUCP was
widely used to route e-mail between computers before that. The article dates
from 1985 and there is no technical excuse not to integrate the different
networks with the technology that has been, by then, available for years. When
I got my first e-mail account, the form they mailed me showed both a modern
"@" address (with a less than modern host.subdomain.domain.tld.country combo)
and my bangpath from the backbone provider.

It's a fact all larger e-mail providers (like the ones mentioned in the
article) either took very long to embrace open standards or failed completely
to do so and vanished from the market. While I don't worry too much about
karma, downmodding for no good reason is, well... Let's just say this is not
Digg.

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onefortwo
E-mail and telephone both cover different situations. Telephone is more
personal, contains information about emotions, feelings and context of the
talk. If the information is about bidirectional feedback then telephone is
much better than E-mail. Since they cover different situations you can't say
what the title say.

With e-mail you can send spam to thousand of people, you can send e-mail to
people that don't know you and that don't care about you. E-mail is like fruit
in a tin, telephone is fresh fruit.

------
known
Videoconferencing with iPhone is the latest trend in India.

