Email Is Immortal

On the occasion of its inventor’s passing, I wrote up a theory for New York about why it has been so hard for a more modern email replacement to take off.

That is, it will remain impossible to build a better communication system until the primary goal is actually communication itself. But by and large, we don’t invest much in creating new open standards, specifications, and protocols around which entirely new classes of tools can be built — we’re too busy trying to sell apps! The funding structure of the technology world is largely set up to fight interoperability.