Today’s Email Is ‘Not Acceptable’

What’s the Latest Development?

Email is unsustainable in its current form, says Neil Murray, co-founder of Mimecast, the cloud-based email provider. Still, email is the only ‘asynchronous, subject-centric’ communication medium agreed upon by the business world. “If you think of Twitter as the far extreme of transparency, and the current traditional email as the least transparent medium and very closed down,” says Murray, “I see email as morphing into a broader capability, transparent, project-centric sharing system.”

What’s the Big Idea?

Email has no choice but to evolve rapidly. For email providers, rather than rolling out big changes between long periods of stability, cloud-based companies will move into a period of ‘continuous delivery’ where new features will be introduced in a matter of days, not months or years. “You’re shipping very small changes in real-time to your cloud production system as your day goes by,” says Murray. “You’re not versioning, you’re not doing all that traditional stuff.”

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