A World Without Email — Year 3, Weeks 24 to 28 (Email Is Where Knowledge Goes to Die – The Presentation)

13 thoughts on “A World Without Email — Year 3, Weeks 24 to 28 (Email Is Where Knowledge Goes to Die – The Presentation)”

  1. @elsua I found your headline of “Email Is Where Knowledge Goes to Die” provocative. There’s a nuance of the individual, the social and the artifacts.

    You appreciate that I’m a big fan of sharing. On my hard disk, I have presentations going back to 1991 (when the company was still using GML), which presumably some day will be gone to the company. Of course, not all of that content is equally valuable, so there’s the human judgement about which situations will benefit by apply archived knowledge (some as wisdom, much as junk).

    In checking my files, I was bemused that my source files are still readable. Before the rise of industry standards and open source, that wasn’t necessarily a sure thing. We were using GML in those days: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Generalized_Markup_Language .

  2. Luis, how’s it going – have you reduced your inbox by 100% yet?! Do keep us updated at All about the Idea and tell us what you think should be voted the greatest idea of all time in our Idea Awards. Great to follow your work. Jo

    1. Hi Bill, thanks a lot for dropping by and for the wonderful comments / additions! It’s greatly appreciated to have such comments to add context on when such an insightful quote came about, long long long before Web 2.0 entered mainstream, not to mention Enterprise 2.0.

      It surely shows how far back email has been having issues as a successful knowledge transfer and collaborative tool and your comments and quote surely helps puts things in perspective. In a number of different blog posts I have been referencing this quote as well and referencing the link you mentioned above, so it certainly helps close the circle quite nicely!

      Many many thanks for that and for the inspiration! 🙂

  3. Luis,

    Yep, email has been a big problem for decades and have you noticed there’s been very little progress? 😉

    Knowledge curation is a more modern way to think about how organizations can avoid corporate amnesia, but few seem willing to invest in these ideas with a bottom-up strategic level approach.

    I also wrote a little bit about it here – http://bit.ly/94fctT

    Having spent 15 years bitching about email, I’ve come to the realization that it’s not likely to change. Tools such as Gist tend to improve the usefulness of existing SMTP-based content but it still feels a bit disjointed. More – http://bit.ly/dfmPnr

    What’s next?

    Certainly not Wave. 😉 I was wrong about Wave – I thought it would profoundly change how we use email (or at least use it less). But the timing and a few other critical elements were not present – mobile apps and lack of Gmail integration are the key reasons it never caught on.

    Wave came out at about the same time the globe started to adopt an app-centric model for communications. In the tsunami of mobile apps for “just about everything”, SMTP will continue to be used as a transport protocol, but mobile apps will tend to mitigate the use of email clients and arbitrate on our behalf to provide more effective use of information.

    The future of communications and knowledge management is already in the palm of your hand – the only thing remaining – mature apps that form a cloud-based grid of information persistence. We can see examples of this pattern emerging already.

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