E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago

One of the major themes of our book is that email is dead. It’s good to see that BusinessWeek is now picking up on the same meme: E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago:

e-mail has hit a wall, creating an impenetrable scale of conversations people don’t need to be a part of and shipping around mounds of information they can’t possibly digest. What was intended as a point-to-point communication tool has been stretched into a broadcast medium.

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Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. … [from comments: The 50% use of wikis is from a Gartner report from last November: “Predicts 2005: Support Improves for Knowledge Workers,” document ID G00123809. The web site is gartner.com and enter the document id number: G00123809. ] At Dresdner, Rangaswami says that among the earliest and most aggressive adopters, e-mail volume on related projects is down 75%; meeting times have been whacked in half.