End of Email- Oh really?

After reading another article on the ‘death of email,’ it seemed like a good idea to write about one of the reasons many companies would be loathe to give it up. The gist of the article is that a large French company, Atos, has banned email and is switching all employees to Facebook and instant messaging. (Find the article here: http://www.businessinsider.com/company-bans-email-2011-12.)

Here are a couple of factors that will probably keep most businesses using email, which also may apply to personal email. First, neither Facebook messaging nor IMs live on company servers…they are out of the company’s control. Companies like to save an electronic ‘paper trail’ for correspondence between employees and between employees and the outside in many cases. A corollary to this is that if there is legal action, the company may receive a demand to produce all email on a matter involved in the action, and that will be more difficult when it involves servers that belong to Facebook and IM providers like AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

Another factor is the intra-company announcement. You know the kind. While some employees may consider many of these spam, so far there has been nothing to replace them for quickly getting information to a large group or even company wide. That will be much more of a chore on IM or Facebook.

For these reasons, and not just as a Luddite, I don’t see email going away any time soon. It may be that the second factor will be tackled with some new code that produces easier wide dissemination in IMs or Facebook, but the company server vs. outside servers issue isn’t going to change.