The following evolved from an answer I gave to a product management question on LinkedIn Answers.
From an engineering perspective, Gmail is a success story. But from a product perspective, its adoption was less successful than other Google products. Gmail is the fourth most popular email service – a far cry from Google’s domination of the search market. The challenge may be amplified as Chrome OS gains market share. As Chrome encourages users to move to web-based email, the majority of these converts may enroll in non-Google services.
Originated almost half a century ago, email is an inadequate platform. It chugs along, true – but only because it’s patched by hacks upon hacks like a steam engine contraption in rural India. When an innovator comes along and fixes one, or few problems, the result is instant success (Hotmail, Gmail, Box.net, Dropbox, Xobni, registered e-mail services such as Readnotify that’s providing the email delivery notifications shown below). You don’t need to be a great innovator to improve email -you just have to see the elephant in the room.
Readnotify has been providing these futuristic email services for several years
Email was introduced in 1965 as a local, intra-site service. It was not designed to be scalable for the global masses, not intended for everyday consumer use world-wide. Some of the functions we take for granted (e.g., attached files) are really ugly hacks from nearly half a century ago, from when cutting edge photography was the now-defunct Polaroid, and the Apple I was years in the future. Users accepted email’s clunkiness because mainframes are clunky, and because computers were so new and exciting. Cooper calls this “The Dancing Bear“: we are mesmerized by the dancing bear not because it dances well, but because it dances at all.
Let us look at what the dance of email software didn’t touch, so far. Curiously, we don’t perceive spam or phishing as bugs of email platforms or software. Same goes for limitations on file size; actually, the very idea of sending an actual file, clogging the information freeway (instead of sending a link to an automatically hosted file) is incredible. To send a 1 MB to picture to ten people, email software might send it ten times instead of sending them all a link to a single file. Or consider the inability to schedule delivery; cancel delivery; receive confirmation on delivery; privacy; mailing lists; no undo, even if the mail you sent was still not received; no version control; you lose accidentally deleted email. These are bugs, glaring omissions and a source for inspiration for future features of email.
We are so proud to be living on the cutting edge of technology! We tweet from a mobile phone (cost: up to $0.25) as we walk down to the post office to send a letter requiring legal confirmation (cost: about $5) like our grandparents. Excuse me if I’m not impressed.
Funny? Wait, how about confirmation calls? We sometimes use the phone to confirm the delivery of a particularly large file. We need to do that, because email systems will not generate an error message (or an apology) when rejecting files that were in fact not too large for the cellphone, camera, media player or most any other gadgets and applications.
Filed under: $1M ideas, Email , Email, Gmail, linkedin, usability
