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E-mail is no more efficient than the telephone or the postal service (1985)

nytimes.com

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Re: E-mail is no more efficient than the telephone or the postal service (1985)

#11

Post by swombat »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #10
swombat wrote: post #8

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, t…

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 differe…

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.

Re: E-mail is no more efficient than the telephone or the postal service (1985)

#13

Post by konad »

ghshephard wrote: post #4

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…

ERIK SANDBERG-DIMENT's pretty good at predictions as noted in this article http://technologizer.com/2009/11/23/windows-laptops-theyll-n...

December 25, 1984

"Windows failed, a doom I preannounce for the yet to be released Microsoft version"

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/25/science/value-of-windowing...

December 8, 1985

"But the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets. Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software, I still can't imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing."

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/08/business/the-executive-com...

I'm not sure if it makes me want to buy his book or not :

They All Laughed When I Sat Down at the Computer: And Other True Tales of One Man's Struggle With Personal Computing

http://www.amazon.com/They-Laughed-When-Down-Computer/dp/013...

Re: E-mail is no more efficient than the telephone or the postal service (1985)

#14

Post by zephyrfalcon »

ghshephard wrote: post #4

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…

"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."

You still can't. As you point out, the vast majority of people have one, but a significant number still doesn't, for various reasons. Email would be less common among, for example, people in rural areas, the elderly, and those who just aren't very interested in this internet thing. Yet all those people usually have phones and can be reached by snail mail... so email still hasn't completely caught up yet.

Also, this prediction is from 1985. It turned out to be completely wrong, but it would have taken quite a visionary to predict the situation in 2010. It wouldn't have been hard to predict in 1985 that future computers would be faster and have more memory and storage space, but going from "64K in a breadbox" to gigabytes of storage, ubiquitous and cheap computers (often embedded in other technology), wireless connections, etc, would have required quite a mental leap. (The point being, that in the 1985 environment, email wouldn't have made a lot of sense, while in 2010 it does. Or actually some people seem to think it's becoming old-fashioned... but that's a different story.)

Re: E-mail is no more efficient than the telephone or the postal service (1985)

#15

Post by rbanffy »

rbanffy wrote: post #9
wmf wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: E-mail is no more efficient than the telephone or the postal service (1985)

#16

Post by Tichy »

ghshephard wrote: post #4

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…

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.

Re: E-mail is no more efficient than the telephone or the postal service (1985)

#17

Post by 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.

Re: E-mail is no more efficient than the telephone or the postal service (1985)

#18

Post by almost »

Tichy wrote: post #16
ghshephard wrote: post #4

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…

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.

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