Email Is The New Pony Express

7/29/2019 Email Is The New Pony Express

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Email Is The New Pony Express--And It's

Time To Put It Down

ByRyan Holmes

|

October 16, 2012

inShare

Email, like paper letters delivered by horseback, has become an

unproductivity tool and may just be the biggest time killer in the modern

workplace. Here's where companies are headed next.

In early 2011, the CEO of a French IT companyissued an usual memorandum. He bannedemail. Employees were discouraged from sending or receiving internal messages, with the

goal of eradicating email within 18 months. Critics scoffed. Workers rebelled. But ThierryBreton, the CEO of Atos, has stuck to his guns, reducing message volume by an estimated20%. His company, by the way, has 74,000 employees in 48 countries.

(

Imagine: A workday without e-mail.

To office workers everywhere struggling to stem the tide of messages filling their inbox, it

probably sounds too good to be true.
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But a French tech company wants to make it a reality. Calling the volume of its e-mail"unsustainable," IT services firm Atos Origin plans to ban internal e-mail from companycommunications within two years.

Instead, employees will communicate mostly through instant-messaging tools or wiki-like

documents that can be edited by multiple users online.

"We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environmentsand also encroaching into our personal lives," said Atos CEO Thierry Breton in a statementearlier this year. "At Atos Origin we are taking action now to reverse this trend."

The issue gained new traction last week when Breton gave an interview to the Wall StreetJournal in which he said he hadn't sent a work e-mail in three years. "If people want to talk tome, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message," he told the newspaper."Emails cannot replace the spoken word."

Breton estimates that only 10% of the 200 messages his employees receive on an average dayare useful, and that 18% is spam. Managers spend between 5 and 20 hours a week reading andwriting e-mails, he says. Atos has 74,000 employees in 42 countries.

An Atos spokeswoman said response to Breton's policy has been "positive" and that thecompany has reduced its volume of internal e-mails by 20 percent in six months.

If trends are any indication, Atos may be on to something. Recent surveys have found e-mailuse declining rapidly among younger people who prefer faster, less formal means ofcommunication such as texting or instant messaging on Facebook or Twitter.

"Atos' decision ... is perhaps the most ringing endorsement yet for the notion that email isbeing gradually phased out of [the workplace]," wrote BonitaSoft CEO Miguel Valds Fauraon the tech blog GigaOm. "It will be interesting to see how many other large scaleorganizations will follow in its footsteps over the next several years."

Interesting indeed. Many harried employees may welcome such an experiment -- unless itmeans more time spent in meetings.

)

Email is familiar. Its comfortable. Its easy to use. But it might just be the biggest killer of

time and productivity in the office today. Ill admit my vendetta is personal. I run a company,

HootSuite, which is focused on disrupting how the world communicates using social media.Yet each day my employees and I send each other thousands of emails, typing out addressesand patiently waiting for replies like we were mailing letters on the Pony Express.

As weve expanded from 20 to 200 employees over the last two years, the headaches haveonly grown. Anyone with an inbox knows what Im talking about. A dozen emails to set up a

meeting time. Documents attached and edited and reedited until no one knows which version

is current. Urgent messages drowning in forwards and cc's and spam.
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Its not just me who thinks emails days are numbered. (In fact, AOL is quietly working onamajor email overhaulthat wold look like mashup of Twitter, Pinterest, and Gmail.) Among18-24 year olds, time spent on webmail has declined 34% in the last year alone, and nearly50% since 2010, according tocomScores 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focusreport.

So what's the solution? Our idea: Turn email into a conversation. Get rid of the inbox. Buildan online platform where departments can post and respond to messages on central discussionthreads, Facebook-style. Then integrate that with Twitter and Facebook so great ideas can bebroadcast--with a click--to the world.Conversationsisnt a revolutionary concept; its a duh-its-about-time concept. And its worked for us and 5 million clients. A year from now, wemay well be reading email its last rites. Heres why:

Email has become an unproductivity tool. Right now, thetypical corporate user spends2hours and 14 minutes every day reading and responding to email, according to McKinseys

2012 Social Economy report. Our inboxes have become an open door for anything andeverything, some of which is pure spam and most of which is neither time-sensitive norrelevant in the here and now. The average business userwades through114 emails a day,which works out to 41,610 messages a year (or one email every 12.6 minutes of your life).
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Email is linear, not collaborative. Email was never intended for collaborative work. Trysetting up a meeting time with a group on email and that becomes painfully obvious.Messages flood in, getting out of sync and leaving users scrolling madly to track theconversation. A better option: Facebook-style discussion threads where multiple employeescan post, reply, and view centrally in real time.

Email is not social. Email is where good ideas go to die. Brilliant messages race across theInternet at light speed only to end up trapped in an inbox. The clear advantage of socialplatforms is that content is shared and reshared among whole communities of followers,triggering the viral cascade that makes social media so powerful. Using internal networks anddiscussion threads instead of email, enterprises can instantly broadcast innovation andcrowdsource solutions company-wide. HootSuite's Conversations takes this up a notch,enabling employees to amplify select messages to Twitter and Facebook, sharing ideas withthe world at a click.

Your inbox is a black hole. You may be able to quickly and easily search your inbox, but

odds are the rest of your department or company cant. And all that locked-up knowledgerepresents a massive, wasted reserve of internal expertise. Office productivity could beimproved by up to 14% just by moving those emails to a searchable, central discussion thread,message board, or wiki, according to a2012 McKinsey report.

Sharing documents on email is a joke.Lets set aside the inconvenience of uploading andattaching files, over and over again. The real trouble with sharing on email starts whenmultiple recipients download and modify a document. Its all too easy to lose track of whichrevision is the latest, leading to redundant edits and wasted time. An infinitely better solutionis to put a single document in one, shared location accessible to all stakeholders. Using toolslike Google Drive, history can be tracked and multiple collaborators can edit simultaneously.

Seeking the path of least resistance, the next generation of office workers are finding better,faster, easier ways to communicate. Its about time.
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AOL's Alto Reimagines The Email

Experience With A Twitter, Pinterest, Gmail

MashupByAdam Bluestein

|

October 18, 2012

Working on the hush-hush, a team of AOL developers has reconceived the

way email is experienced.

Photograph by Thomas Hannich

How does it feel to throw a product launch and have nobody come? Just ask AOL. In

November 2010, the company unveiledProject Phoenix, a platform intended to rev up itsdoddering email business. Once synonymous with email--and mailbox-cluttering installationCDs/drink coasters--AOL had been lapped by free-mail rivals Yahoo, Microsoft, andGoogle,and an @aol.com email address had become the tech equivalent of an AARP membershipcard. The goal with Phoenix was to turn that around by offering Gmailesque features such asthreaded emails and built-in chat, plus new functions like the ability to update your Facebookand Twitter statuses. The company even offered alternatives to the unhip AOL domain name:@ygm.com ("you've got mail"), @games, @wow, and @love. And to maximize itsusefulness, Phoenix let users aggregate any external email accounts into their AOL inbox.

Phoenix landed with a thud. Existing AOL Mail users didn't see a compelling reason to switch

to the platform, and--perhaps because it looked so much like Gmail--neither did many other
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people. (At its peak, Phoenix had 30,000 users; currently it's chugging along with 15,000devotees despite the fact that AOL no longer officially supports the service.)

Email hasnt had a serious rethink really since Gmail came out. We wanted to take a swing at that.

Now, with less fanfare, AOL is trying again with a platform called Alto, which launched onOctober 18. But unlike Phoenix, which merely tweaked the email experience, Alto is acomplete reimagination of it. And here's a real shocker: AOL produced Alto through the kindof speedy, agile development process you'd associate with a startup, not a $3 billioncorporation that defined web 1.0.

Alto is the product of a deliberate strategy change in the wake of the Phoenix fail. DavidTemkin, AOL's SVP of mobile and mail, split AOL's email operations into two tracks. Onegroup continued to work on upgrading existing AOL users via incremental improvements thatwere unveiled this July. The other team, working under the radar even within the company,had license to create a truly disruptive product. "Email hasn't had a serious rethink really sinceGmail came out," says Temkin. "We wanted to take a swing at that and not be tethered by theexisting 20 million or so people using AOL Mail. The idea was to create without scrutiny andquestioning."

David Temkin, right, AOLs SVP of mobile and mail, gave Alto director Joshua Ramirez, left, and his

team free rein to create an email product that looks and functions unlike any other platform. | Photo

by Kevin Kunishi


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Temkin assembled a cross-functional team of about a dozen developers, designers, andproduct managers, led by Joshua Ramirez, a senior director for product management of AOLMail and Alto. Both Ramirez, a 37-year-old who had previously logged time at Apple, eBay,and Yahoo, and Temkin, 45, a veteran of Apple and Palm, brought fresh eyes to the project,having joined the company after the Phoenix launch. Drawing on insights gleaned from

ethnographic studies of Phoenix users, they aimed to keep what people liked (aggregatingmultiple email accounts, for instance) and remedy what they didn't (multiple accounts alsomultiplied inbox clutter and email anxiety).

First proposed in April 2011, Alto was slated for a beta launch the following October. "Whatallowed us to move so quickly was having design, development, and product constantly talkin real time," says Ramirez. "It wasn't your typical waterfall process, where you definerequirements, the developers build it, hand it off to QA, and 12 months later you have aproduct. This was continuous development." Key details were ironed out during an off-sitehackathon, in August, at a rustic retreat near Monterey, California. Says Ramirez, "We packedthree weeks into six days."

Visually, Alto won't be mistaken for its competition. "We wanted a product that could attractpeople from across a coffee shop," says Temkin, who relied on design director Bill Wetherellto create a user interface that passed "the 15-foot test." Alto is a web-based client that lookslike a mashup ofTwitterandPinterest, with incoming mail showing up in a vertical feedalong the left side of the page. Abutting it is a thin column of icons for basic functions(compose a message, find a contact). The right two-thirds of the window is dominated byrows of tiles called "stacks." These are the source of the platform's unique look, as well as itsinnovative functionality. "We wanted to provide a post-foldering approach to organization,"says Ramirez. (You can create folders in Alto, but AOL's studies show that few consumersactually use them.) The stacks update dynamically and work continuously, automaticallysorting incoming messages, which also appear in your main feed, into five default groupings:daily deals, social notifications, retail, photos, and attachments.

These piles reflect the most common categories of email received by AOL accounts--and thefact is that even in the Facebook era, email remains the de facto beast of burden for photosand attachments. Notes Temkin, "No one's going to send bills to your Facebook account, andyou're not going to get financial statements sent over text messages."

Alto uses a visual search to display the content being delivered: Click on the photos orattachments stack and you get an instant array of thumbnails displaying its contents--no

searching or opening of messages required. Users can also create custom stacks for subjectslike travel, work projects, or family by setting simple rules for sorting by sender, domain, orkeywords. There's even an option to have certain types of messages bypass the inboxaltogether, instead sending them right to a stack for periodic checking. Explains Temkin, "Bysifting through bulk mail, you end up with the things that really matter in your inbox."

From studying Phoenix, the Alto team knew that while people like to aggregate multipleaccounts, they didn't want to set up a new account in order to do so. With Alto, users cansimply log in with an existing Gmail, Yahoo, .mac, or AOL account. (At least initially, Altowon't support POP3 email.) This is a platform meant to streamline your routine, not add to it.
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And Now To Get The Domain Name...

There were a lot of good reasons for AOL to go with Alto as the name of its new emailplatform. We wanted something abstract and easy to spell that can expand beyond mail,

says AOLs David Temkin. It suggests a high-level view of email and has a good history in

the tech industry. (The Xerox Alto, developed in the 70s, was one of the first personalcomputers.)

But there was a downside to the product name, too: namely, Franck Joly, a Frenchman whobought the alto.com domain back in 1995. Though he isnt using the URL, he is still the

admin of it, and as of press time, hasnt responded to AOLs overtures. Its not like were

offering five bucks, says Ramirez. Contacted via email, Joly writes only that there has beensome strange proposition but not serious contact at this time. Translation: Before it can

bring stacks of Alto email to the world, AOL may have to bring stacks of cash to France.

Still in development is Alto's business model. Mail is a key driver for AOL's mediaproperties--the default entry point for AOL Mail users is the AOL Today page, which links totop stories from the Huffington Post, Patch, and other AOL brands. Temkin insists thatconnecting users to content won't be as central to Alto, though there will eventually be a "topstories" stack containing news clippings that link to, say, HuffPo articles. "We're looking atways of monetizing this product," he says. "Unlike AOL Mail, we'll likely implementpremium features that you pay for on a subscription basis. AOL Mail is a purely advertising-supported product. Alto is optimized for acquiring email users who are open to a newexperience."

Even if Alto grabs those users, Macquarie Capital analyst Ben Schachter says it's not likely to

elevate AOL's fortunes in the short term. Although its stock price has more than doubled in2012 and the company posted its smallest revenue decline in seven years in the secondquarter--thanks largely to a $1 billion patent sale to Microsoft--AOL's revenue from displayadvertising on its media properties was basically flat, and its subscription-access businesscontinued free-falling, dropping another 13%. "Efforts like new mail or video are interesting,"says Schachter, "but AOL hasn't proved it can make them into meaningful businesses.Changing people's email habits is a tough thing to do."

Six weeks before launch, a calm and confident-seeming Ramirez and Temkin are focused onsoftware bugs, not business plans, making sure that the "minimal viable product" that earlyadopters see this fall "works well, is beautiful, and addresses the main case uses of email,"

says Temkin. "We're a big company and we want to rebuild a reputation for innovation. I feelwe have an infinitely stronger product than we did with Phoenix--but it's best to speak softlyand carry a big demo."

The Assorted Looks Of Alto

Weary of trying to keep your email organized? AOLs new platform fights fatigue with a

dynamic visual solution.


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SORTED FROM THE START

Alto scans messages arriving in a users inbox (top) and organizes them into customizablestacks (bottom).


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PHOTOS AT A GLANCEA photos stack is included as a default. Click it and you instantly get thumbnails of every

image in your inbox.


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SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICSAlto creates a stack for notifications from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and any other socialsite you choose. It also provides a visual analysis of traffic from each sender.

Email Is The New Pony Express

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