Why Email Is Still The Most Adopted Collaboration Tool

An anonymous reader writes "Isaac Garcia, the founder of a Web 2.0 Collaboration Software company, writes bluntly about why Email is still the preferred and most adopted collaboration solution around. 'So, why are Collaboration Software Vendors (Central Desktop included), keen on vilifying email and so quick to promise a practical alternative to the chaos of email? And, if the vendor's software is so much better than email, than why do users revert back to email as soon as they hit a snag in the system? Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?'"

Simple

It has worked and it continues to work well despite all the short comings mentioned in the article. Because of this people have adopted the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude.

At least that's my two cents.

And it's less restrictive

It's also a low-energy medium. You can answer messages when they come in or wait until you're ready and format the messages however you want. Most collaboration systems require a lot of user focus either to respond in real time or to satisfy strict interface requirements. E-mail allows people to communicate in their own way, not the way of the application.

Re:And it's less restrictive

Like other guy said, it doesn't matter if I'm booked or not, they schedule the meeting anyway. Anyhow, it shouldn't be assumed that because I do not have a meeting scheduled, I am available, particularly on one hour notice. I COULD book 8-5 every day, for the entire year, but the tool is now totally useless for people who I have approved a meeting for.

The bottom line is that availability is a BAD thing. It's like money and real estate. The more you have to give away, the more people will want. You need to keep quiet about it, dole it out only to the deserving and only in the amount they need. If people don't know your availability, and have to ask you first, you are in control of where the time goes and how much. I think Louis XIV was the one most famous for this technique of dealing with bureacracy.

As it stands I have to play a cat and mouse game with "tentative" responses (because declines are often sent to managers for negative use on performance reviews) and finding the people who really did have an important meeting and making sure they understand tentative is my code for "a meeting I rejected implicitly", without actually telling them that because I may want to decline them some other day. It sucks up a lot of time, and worse, my cell phone (which I download my calendar too) understands tentative as "booked", so I can't rely on it to tell me what meeting i need to be attending, and when I have time to do real work.

Like most of us, management will not approve overtime, I'm "exempt", but I'm not going to work overtime without pay. There is plenty of work to do for an 8 hour day with 0 meetings. The only solution is to manage time carefully, something made extremely difficult by these sorts of "productivity" tools.

Email works, everyone has it

So, why are Collaboration Software Vendors (Central Desktop included), keen on vilifying email and so quick to promise a practical alternative to the chaos of email?

So they can increase their profits by selling businesses software they may not even need.

And, if the vendor's software is so much better than email, than why do users revert back to email as soon as they hit a snag in the system?

Because email works, period.

Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?

Usually, it will just be another application to learn aside from your email and IM, and doesn't provide any greater functionality.

Am I the next master of the obvious? ;)

Re:Email works, everyone has it

Usually, it will just be another application to learn aside from your email and IM, and doesn't provide any greater functionality.
This brings us to yet another reason why email is still around; simplicity. All the functionality you need in email already exists. It conveys all the needed information in a simple format and is easily understood. Anything else is just trimmings.

Re:Email works, everyone has it

So, why are Collaboration Software Vendors [...]
(bolding mine)
All we need to do is to point at this single word.

Since you mentioned electricity

This morning before even reading this article I woke up thinking about plain email versus "fancy" email. In McLuhan-esque terms

The content of a medium is another medium. The content of a web page is a book (sometimes a film) and the content of email is speech. Your pithy, useful, one-liner emails resemble a bit of conversation a lot more than they do a piece of text.

Speech is electric (it was your sig that inspired me to post here). Books are not. Books move very slow and require a committee to "get them right". Speech is autonomous, isolated, demands free action. It's like the difference between cars jammed up on a highway (or content-management) system and people zipping around on their own personal jetpacks.

Re:Email works, everyone has it

Don't forget, even if you're starting from scratch, you won't make a profit selling an email system. Even a fancy Exchange setup costs so much in licensing that you're not going to be turning over a good profit.

On the other hand, selling someone a video confrencing suite, or a huge fancy intranet application with built in messaging and project management, will make you a very handy profit.

geee

"why do users revert back to email as soon as they hit a snag in the system?"

Mmmmh... i love the smell of rhetorical questions in the morning...

Email

EMAIL Is Just that EMAIL. And the system is stressed to hell. I had a client of mine attempt to attach a 500 meg file an email.. Wtf.. I asked him if he would put a postage stamp on a brick and mail it... and quite didnt understand. Email should be left to its "mail" - dont start adding layers to something that was never meant to be.

Re:Email

COMPUTERS Is Just that COMPUTERS. And they are all stressed to hell. I had a client of mine attempt to hook two computers together with a phone line. Wtf.. I asked him if he would put glue on a brick and stick it to another brick... and quite didnt understand. Computers should be left to its "algorithms"- dont start adding layers to something that was never meant to be.

end result- dust and a DEA note

http://www.directcreative.com/aaexperiments.html [directcreative.com]
Wrapped brick. Wrapped in brown paper; posted in street corner box with same amount of postage as was strapped to unwrapped brick. Extreme weight for size made package seem suspicious. Notice of attempted delivery received, 16 days. Upon pickup at station, our mailing specialist received a plastic bag containing broken and pulverized remnants of brick. Inside was a small piece of paper with a number code on it. Our research indicates that this was some type of US Drug Enforcement Agency release slip. The clerk made our mailing specialist sign a form for receipt.

Re:Email

A few years ago, a 500K file was routine and we were able to e-mail those. Now 500 MB files are pretty routine. My computer can handle it, the network can handle it, my memory stick (used to be floppies) can handle it. Why shouldn't my e-mail handle it too?

While you're using mailed bricks as a metaphor, I'd put a postage stamp on a brick and mail it if that was what I needed to do for my job. In other words, I do what I need to do to get my job done. Sometimes I have to do it in a way that doesn't make sense from the outside. Believe me, I'm trying to fix that. But in the meantime, I mail the brick because I have to. Everyone can receive the brick I mail them and the postal service has a reasonable service level when it comes to intact delivery of my brick.

Re:Email

For many people email is the only way they know of transferring files. How else is some low-level secretary going to send a file - SFTP it to a web server and email a link? Unlikely. Email is omnipresent, virtually instantaneous from the point of view of the sender and already understood by 99% of users

Re:Email

EMAIL Is Just that EMAIL. And the system is stressed to hell. I had a client of mine attempt to attach a 500 meg file an email.. Wtf.. I asked him if he would put a postage stamp on a brick and mail it... and quite didnt understand. Email should be left to its "mail" - dont start adding layers to something that was never meant to be.

What a moron! Why didn't he just ask the recipient to setup an FTP server in the DMZ, configure FTP over SSH, set him up a user account and give him the IP and relevant login information so he could just FTP it? Sheesh, when will these users ever learn?

Why I'd refuse to adopt collaboration software

as opposed to e-mail.

• Platform neutrality.
• Everyone uses it and knows how to use it.
• It's free.
• It works, damnit!
• Intraweb applications tend to suck.

Because it is simple

You cannot get any easier than email. The collaboration software, you have to understand it and it requires more effort. However, if you just want to get something done quickly people are going to just go straight to email.

Why?

"Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?'"

Well, that can be summed up in a single word, "proprietary".

Steve: Gee, lets add Bob from company X into this discussion since they will be doing the design for the double ended latex parts.
Bob: Sure, I use iCollaborate - Black Turtleneck Edition V3.0.7
Steve: Looks like that won't work with our MS proprietary Subscribe and Collaborate With Those Who Also Subscribe V8.1.1 Security Edition.
IT Longhair: Well, you could all switch to Open Featureless Collaborate With Clunky Interface V 0.0.2.
Steve and Bob: Get bent.
Steve: Bob, go to the iSuite
Bob: No, you go to Subscribe.
IT Longhair: Your computers will never run right again, trust me, but you will never be able to prove it is me. Ph33r the admin.

So ends the tale of proprietary bullshit. Every vendor must foster ths because the funding, patent, and legal system is broken. Until it is changed, nothing will change.

The only question left is why people keep wondering why incompatible, proprietary and patent laden crap doesn't take off, even if it truly is the better way.

          -Charlie

P.S. I personally think it all sucks regardless, but that is just my opinion.

Lack of training

The biggest problem I see with users failing to accept a new system and reverting to old bad habits is a lack of real training in how to use the system, and more importantly, why it is better. People need to adjust to new ways of working, and not everyone is capable of being thrown in at the deep end and working things out for themselves. But time and time again I see projects where there is simply no budget allocated for user training, and when it all falls down us developers get blamed.

Jolyon

Why?

Because it is full of internets: (http://studentpages.scad.edu/~tfarre20/email_cart oon.mpg [scad.edu])

three reasons

Off the top of my head, three reasons email rules the roost:

1. It's ubiquitous. Everyone has it, and everyone uses it. You never run into any snag because your mother doesn't use the same collaboration tool (for planning your dad's 60th birthday) as your company uses (for planning the company president's 60th birthday).

2. It fails gracefully. Everybody knows email isn't perfect, and that the user's actions have a large inpact on it, so you always plan around the fact that people are forgetful, misplace things, delete stuff without meaning to and so on. You send reminders, ask for real confirmation replies (not automated calendar updates), keep a look at the general email banter for signs of misunderstandings and so on. If an email is misplaced, it will probably get caught or planned around.

3. It has an obvious mental model. An email is a note. You pass it to people, make copies of it, forward it, delete it. There is no complex internal state to the system to (mis)understand. All functional complexity lies with the users - and we're extraordinary good at understanding that particular complex system, and indeed find it joyful to do so.

Psychological?

I suspect it's the feeling that you have physically sent something to a real person and seen it leave your outbox, rather than a page reloading to say "Thanks for your feedback!" and the idea that you can actually write something the way you want rather than filling out some rigid form? Pretty much the same reasons some people prefer to write letters than filling out long ludacris forms with questions that don't apply to them or they just can't answer.

With e-mail it's also easier to have a personal copy of correspondence in your outbox whereas other solutions are going to leave you with it scattered across lots of systems, websites and whatnot.

many reasons

Yes, it has its shortcomings, and honestly, given the choice I would not use something as inflexible and unwieldy as EMail to coordinate groups.

But you have to look at the problems and the possible solution. And finally you have to conform to the least common denominator. And more often than not, that's EMail.

Look at your task, look at the problems, look at the shortcomings your environment has and you'll find that EMails are for many problems the only solution that fixes ALL your problems. Not as good as many other options, but at least they work.

Scenario: You have 5 people. Distributed over the world. One of them traveling all the time and the only access to the net he has is his cell. This alone puts many coop-tools out of the ability to serve as the underlying structure. A few more are culled when you look at the quirks of his cell (find two brands that work the same way...). Then have some strict guidelines that keep you from installing "unapproved" software (and knowing how long it takes 'til you get approval, you know that you won't be able to keep any deadline if you wanted to use the soft), so you could only use coop tools that don't inject themselves into your system so you can be SURE it won't interfere with other software you're using, squat, another bunch of coop tools leave the pool.

And after you're done, you're sitting there with EMail again as the only viable option. So far, that's what I've been experiencing. Maybe someone will develop a tool that is as omnipresent and easy to use and integrate as EMail, and he will definitly take the market. But so far, no such thing.

Maybe it models how we really get things done?

Maybe email is more like how we like to work. We think for a while on something, then we gather information (Google it), then we seek out the input of others (email), then we think on it some more, then we start to build/write/mold a rough outline. Then we stand back, look at it, and pretty much repeat the previous cycle of discovery and synthesis as needed.

Collaboration software seems to me more like a committee meeting. Good for getting a team of people touching the same base, but not good for actual accomplishement.

Why eMail? That's Easy...

Email is everywhere, it has a low overhead, it's quick and it's simple. Most of all though you don't need to know anything about the tool you are using - it's like talking to someone.

Most of these types of tools I have tried force you to do more than is required to get the job done such as cataloguing each message. Sometimes that type of functionality is useful but most of the time it just gets in the way.

Echoes of TFA

Funny to read all of these responses which are basically parroting the article and its stated reasons. Sad thing is, most of them will probably rocket up to the top with +5 Informative or +5 Insightful mods as people with mod points who haven't read TFA come in.

While Email is an excellent collaboration medium in a lot of ways, it still suffers from a bit of the lag that snail mail always did. Admittedly the lag time is down to hours or even minutes rather than days, but you're still faced with the need to cover a lot of ground in your letters, hoping to cover all possible avenues of conversation. *grin* And there's still a hefty amount of people in offices out there who will duly print out and file a copy of your email asking if they're available for lunch.

So while Email remains an extremely useful tool, I think most people are moving on to some form of IM or another, for the sake of speed and immediacy. True, everyone has a proprietary solution to the situation of IM, but I think there are enough aggregating clients out there like Gaim and Trillian that offer most of the functionality (you know, like chatting through the software rather than trying to share photo albums and the like) that people are finding common ground. Now if only they could learn how to spell...

Simple really

Email is not the dominant collaboration tool, because it is not a collaboration tool. It is an asynchronous communication medium targeted at human beings.

Being a medium and not an application means that different applications can be built upon it. This is sometimes good (automated project management notifications), sometimes indifferent (your sister-in-law who forward every joke she hears to everyone she's ever met) and sometimes bad (sapam).

Versatility, not just familiarity.

TFA confuses things a bit by focusing on the features of email. BCC and CC, searchability -- yeah, those are useful, but I'd guess many, if not a majority of email users don't use them. And when you get to email clients, those things offer practically no help as to email's success. Whatever you do, don't emulate outlook as an interface (and yes, I've been using outlook almost exclusively for nearly a decade)

Yes, the author is right that everyone's being familiar with Email helps it, and it's not something that everyone has to learn; likewise with SMTP being the common thread.

But well, I think the reason's a lot simpler. Email is simply more versatile than any number of collaboration tools because it can adapt to any number of tasks, and can be used in any number of ways. And underneath that is a basic design lesson that is most misunderstood. A good tool is one that can be used in a variety of ways, and people will prefer good tools. The problem is that, in the software world "use in a variety of ways" gets misunderstood. Take a flathead screwdriver. "use in a variety of ways" means, in addition to turning screws (its predominant application in many environments), it can open paint cans, punch corks into winebottles, and, eventually, serve as a magnet. To your "office software design committee", "use in a variety of ways" means, in addition to turning screws by being rotated, it can turn screws by pressing a button, or by affixing the screwdriver into an optional clamp attachment and rotating the object with the screw around the driveer. But the minute you apply it to a paint can, it breaks.

The point is, people don't need many ways to do the same thing; they need one tool that can do many things.

So let's return to the office collaboration thingembob: the annoying thing about office software for me is that it makes assumptions about what kind of work I'm going to be doing. And somewhere, that work falls under the rubric "business", and, like the syllabus for an MBA, includes all kinds tidbits and distractions that nobody in the business world ever uses.

The point is: email is not only simple; it can be used in many different ways. In any group, you'll have different levels of computer expertise and different levels of group involvement. Very rarely and in a few fields are the two linked. If you're building software for people to work together, don't focus on "expert users" or giving anyone specific training: make it do as little as possible, as simply as possible. After all, as I tell people repeatedly, it is much more efficient for most people to know how to do a few basic things in relatively inefficient manner, than to learn all the bells-and-whistles of a complex piece of software.

Things that are easy in the IT world, aren't elsewhere. Try setting up a revision control system for editing 14th-century Latin manuscripts.

Network Effect

The Network Effect [wikipedia.org] is at work.

The value of a network is equal to the power of the number of nodes. SMTP Email has many more nodes than any other collaboration option. In order to eclipse email another collaboration technology must have several orders of magnitude more value per node to overcome the network value added of email.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

I develop "collaboration software". Actually it's document management software with collaboration tools built in.

My plan for making the software easier to implement was to make it work with email, not separate from it. Keep It Simple Stupid. Most user already check their email multiple times per day, so why create another "inbox" for them to check? It's more work, more effort and therefore simply it simply won't get done (not to mention all of the belly aching and complaining that would come with it).

It's much easier for a user to get an email that says "Joe Blow wants you to "take out the garbage". Do you wish to [accept] or [reject] this task? If you do not respond within the next [# hours / days] we will assume you reject the task. This task must be completed by [Sunday @ 5pm].