Love it or loath it, most of us spend a large proportion of our working days in our chosen e-mail application.
Whether it’s writing or reading e-mails or searching in vain for that e-mail from someone which had that data that you knew would be useful at a later point so you carefully filed it away and now your folder system isn’t quite as effective as you thought it was (big breath!).
Wired has an interesting report on the Inbox e-mail conference which is currently taking place. They point out that e-mail is practically unchanged in thirty years and unless there are some radical changes it’s going to implode.
They quote Google’s forthcoming GMail service as an example of some innovation. Wouldn’t we all love the power of a Google search in our e-mail. I can’t wait until Google ship a product for my documents and my e-mail.
“E-mail technology has remained virtually unchanged since it was first developed in the early 1970s. But as more and more individuals and businesses have begun to rely on their inboxes to manage important documents — and as marketers have begun to fill those inboxes with spam — the system has begun to show signs of stress.”
Murphy's Law 