Are Enhancements to Email Products Worth the Effort?
For years we have heard some version of the now almost clichéd phrase "Email is dead." On the contrary and in the midst of all the innovations happening in social networking, the need for having an email account has barely diminished. Recently many tech companies have been investing in making the email experience better than what it has been traditionally.
Traditional email programs seem to have a few shortcomings. There is no intuitive way to deal with email clutter. The email user experience on mobile devices is not ideal. Email is often perceived as a communication medium that is disconnected from social media. Recent announcements by IBM, Microsoft, and Google among others seem to be addressing some of these areas.
A Tech Times article shares a startling statistic:
There are around 108 billion work-related emails sent all over the world daily and these require people to check emails about 36 times in one hour on average. To make matters worse, just 14 percent of these emails are actually important.
This data seems to be the driving thought behind IBM's new email product Verse. Being true to its tagline "Mail that understands you," Verse uses analytics to deal with email clutter. Verse learns a user's usage pattern and figures out a way to differentiate between emails that are important and the ones that are not, thereby leading to more clarity. Verse also makes use of the concept of Work Graphs, which ensures the social network representation of participants in an email communication along with work artefacts to get the work done.
Microsoft recently launched a tool called Clutter to Office 365 business customers. Clutter, as the name indicates, helps users prioritize emails automatically and helps them focus on what’s important. It deploys sophisticated machine learning techniques to determine which messages are clutter, and as it learns more over time, it gets better at accurately classifying the messages.
Google also recently made an attempt to reinvent the email experience for mobile users by launching an app called Inbox. True to Google's tradition, it is an invite-only app, and it managed to create some good buzz. Inbox has some simplification features, including Bundles for automatic email organization and Highlights for showing important information at a glance, among others.
Looking back at recent history, email was facing a sort of feature-by-feature extinction. Social networking apps such as Facebook and Twitter almost replaced the need to send messages. Apps like Instagram almost replaced the need to send photos by email. Linkedin's InMail almost replaced the need to send messages to professional contacts.
Email still retained its importance for specific uses, such as sending targeted newsletters, and more so in business where security, privacy, and maintaining a record trail of communication is of importance. In such a scenario, the current focus on email enhancements will certainly benefit many users.
Do you agree?
