Email is dead. Long live email.

This week’s post is about email. As you probably know, email started - and we can have a lively debate about this - at the same time as the Internet was born. As the Internet gained popularity, so did email, soon becoming the preferred method of communication.

I am not going to bore you with all the history. The interesting thing about email is that it has been written off so many times. Over decades, we were promised newer, better ways to communicate. Yet The Atlantic calls it The Internet’s Unkillable App. Its importance is not disappearing. Just this fall, for instance, Mailchimp founders cash out in $12 billion deal with Intuit. - allowing the buyers to build value for their customers in all kinds of ways.

Why is email so popular? Because of its simplicity, reliability and the network effect. The more people have it and use it, the more valuable it is.

There are more than 4 billion email addresses - enough for half of the population of Earth to have an address. It’s still far less than the number of phone numbers, which is almost 8 billion, but still, pretty good. Better than Facebook’s 2.91 billion user accounts. And 10 times larger than Twitter’s user base.

Here’s a short story about why I have such a soft spot for email. In 2000, I was working on a system for one of our customers. This system required us to move image files between individual machines. The files were big. However, the connectivity was unreliable and slow. The communication protocols of today just were not available then. There was no AWS S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive… none of them existed yet.

What was available was email. I was able to achieve everything which was required and more. When we had to physically move a portion of the system to another location, there was virtually no reconfiguration required. The overall downtime was minimal. It was that simple. I even got a patent for the system I built for the customer.

I remind myself about this project quite often. There is always the tendency to over-architect a technology solution or bring the latest and greatest technology to the mix, just because it feels cool. You can observe the same thing now with the marketing buzz around AI. We hear never-ending stories about amazing technologies which were too early and too complicated to be useful.

Don't hide behind more technology. Instead, let your creativity shine. Your solutions will stand the test of time. And that's the recurrent pattern.