I don’t like email.
You may have heard of ambitions like “Inbox Zero” and seen books like Inbox Detox floating around. You may be used to seeing this:
Inbox (627)
You may go to work every other day with the primary goal (stated or not) of simply surviving your inbox. A curious state of affairs.
Noise
Corporate email in particular is full of noise. Customer satisfaction issues, more often than you might think, can be traced to the technically proper but disastrous use of email. For example, picture yourself in a serious email chain with like 23 people included. Often, little breakout discussions from the main thread occur by replying to a subset. Someone might change a subject line, starting a whole new sub-thread. Tracking all this and rolling it back up is time-consuming, not easy to do, and sometimes requires editing inappropriate comments out of sub-threads. So it usually just doesn’t happen.
Now, let’s assume that one of these sub-threads involved a decision about how to handle a customer requirement. That thread comes to a conclusion and everyone likes the approach, so that’s that. But everyone else in the main thread (or other sub-threads) may have their own conclusion or be unaware of the conclusion. Any number of these situations can lead to conflicting messages to customers or conflicting expectations about what will occur next, when it will occur and who will follow-up.
All because of a subject-line change. Should the specific characters used in the subject line really have this much impact? No. As my boss would say, “eh, not so much.”
Outlook
Many business use Outlook for their employee email at a certain scale. Many run Windows, the IT guys use Active Directory to manage that, and therefore it fits right in. And then it becomes the primary communication vehicle for the entire company.
Outlook stores things in these cool little .pst files. You may have found them. This is a stretch, but you may have actually backed them up once or twice. This is really a stretch, but your IT guys may auto-back them up for you to the network.
If you’ve used Outlook for a long time and you’re a busy person, your .pst files are probably approaching a terabyte in size. This probably means that Outlook takes 3 days to launch, 3 days to shut down and sometimes it fails to shut down correctly as well. It also spins your disk a lot, even though you need to move threads around and handle messages at near warp speed to keep up with the influx of new items.
So you are paying a productivity price for local disk storage of an immense wealth of company IP, historical discussions of note and records of important decisions. And that’s very, very risky.
Microsoft has recognized that Outlook has started to become a distributed corporate database. I think advances in the file system and the new search approach are at least a response in part to this phenomena. The big question is whether Outlook Pro (not Express) will start to move more and more towards a communication platform than a ‘roid-raging email client.
Xobni

These guys turned down a huge buyout from Microsoft. So, clearly they are swinging for the fence. Or insane. Or both. I’m leaning towards the fence thing.
Xobni attempts to improve the utility of Outlook by adding analytics and incorporating other outside channels of communication (like Facebook and Twitter) in to Outlook based on your contact’s identity.
I am a huge fan of this tool. It improves the utility of Outlook in important ways for me. But, it does not solve all the other problems I’m trying to outline here. It’s an improvement to email, but it’s still email. [Insert swearing here]. And it’s still Outlook, so it’s still kind of dangerous.
MOC

Eventually, people began to notice that they were using email to chat. That was really inefficient. So, projects like Jabber and Microsoft Office Communicator came about to try to provide business-friendly chat. A lot of large companies that run on Active Directory and Outlook use MOC. The result of this trend has been that people now use email and chat programs to chat. And since many of these chat services don’t auto-archive conversations, it has the effect of replicating many of the problems of email being used for non-repudiated records of business activity, but without the actual recording. And it’s not durable like email such that it’s very conducive to asynchronous responses.
Also, it frequently doesn’t work very well, dropping messages and entire conversations.
What’s also insidious, and subtle, is that now people have to think about whether they should email someone or try to chat with them based on things like “status” (very gameable) and what type of conversation they anticipate they might end up having.
Additionally, people receiving chat messages often feel like they must answer them, so their productivity decreases. But they feel like they can’t turn it off, because people will view them as unresponsive. Telecommuters often feel like it represents their physical presence in the workplace and that they will be forgotten if they are not visible—this can sometimes lead to excessive meetings and unnecessary email threads as a way to generate pseudo-face time.
So now the problem is in some ways much worse.
Enter Google Wave

I won’t duplicate all that has been written about Wave here, but this project is basically an attempt to evolve beyond the issues cited above and re-baseline personal and professional (but mostly professional) general internet-based communication. To which I say, even if it fails, bring it on. I will add my tears of laughter and joy as salty drops in the wave. It can’t get much worse.
If you want to take a peek, Ars Technica has a good rundown. Also, I’m sure micro-blogging could have been worked in to this post as well, but I didn’t have the time. If that offends you, tweet me. I’m just sitting here waiting for my invite to arrive.