The New Apps Frontier

Apple seems to be running circles around its competition right now. Just as it looked as if Android might be gaining enough market share to put some pressure on Apple’s, Apple turns one record quarter after another. Sure, Google is gaining market share but the only profit from Android-based phones appears to be made by Google’s advertising business.

Impressive are not only Apple’s revenue and profits but also the diversification of their portfolio. Not only does the iPhone account for more than half of Apple’s revenue, the iPad contributes now more than the iMac which is not doing too poorly either. And yet Apple has another trump card in their pocket which they will pull when the time is ripe - the Apple TV.

It hasn’t been widely reported, but the Apple TV is powered by iOS - the same operating system that is used in the iPhone and iPad. That suggests that many of the hundreds of thousand of apps available in the App Store today could run on Apple TV too. Not all of them will work, of course, as the user interface, resolution, and other capabilities of the device are different. But popular apps such as weather, news, RSS reader, maps, charts, calendars, and even a browser are apps that would be useful today on a TV screen.

Apple TV actually already provides a small number of apps including Netflix, YouTube, Flickr, a photo viewer and a music and video player. Presumably not much is needed to open the device to developers and I suspect that the existing development tools and skills are highly applicable. It is also likely that Apple will add a mouse or the touch pad to Apple TV which would open the door for many more interactive apps.

This will be a massive source of additional revenue for Apple and also a huge competitive advantage. Developers are already realizing that building apps for iOS gets them way more bang for their investment buck than building for the other mobile operating systems. A single iOS app runs on all devices including iPhone, iTouch, and iPad. In contrast, many developers are today complaining about the fragmentation of the Android market where an app built for Samsung Galaxy may or may not work on the HTC EVO. That’s why most developers still start with iOS support before moving on to Android - at least that’s what Flurry, Inc. recently reported.

Apple is not the only vendor pursuing this idea - all the game consoles have the same ambition. My Nintendo Wii supports a couple of apps including Netflix. Microsoft demonstrated their Xbox 360 with Lync-based video conferencing at the recent Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC). Intelligent devices connected to a TV set are going to be the next app frontier. And Apple has an incredible advantage as their TV device runs on a well tested operating system with thousands of existing apps.

Practical Gamification Use Case

Gamification is a buzz word making the rounds lately. The idea is very simple – drive user adoption and employee engagement by turning the use of enterprise software into a game. Deep inside, we are apparently all gamers and can’t resist playing. It starts already in kindergarten when we used to collect stickers on a chart – whoever had the most stickers got a reward – I win, you lose. 

Now, we are applying the same principle to the workplace by adding game elements to enterprise software. We can earn points and badges by sharing information, contributing to discussions, completing assignments, passing tests, or closing deals. What used to be a performance chart on the manager’s office wall is now a leader board with employees leveling up all the way to a Champion or Grandmaster level. 

I must admit, it is pretty addictive and the amazing thing is that it seems to work. Inspired by the world of video games and more recently by social games such as Foursquare, gamification is invading the enterprise. I have recently spent a little bit of time with the IT developers at OpenText who have built our new gaming application called the “Leaderboard”. Leaderboard is not an OpenText product; at least not yet. This is OpenText as a customer building a custom application on top of the existing commercial offering. That commercial offering happens to be OpenText Pulse, a social media product that the OpenText Content Server customers can simply add on top of their existing deployment.

I've quickly completed a couple of tasks get a decent ranking

The team designed the Leaderboard not only to drive internal adoption of Pulse but also to stimulate the desirable employee behavior. Different social interactions earn points – posting a comment, liking someone else’s comment, sharing a document, etc. By collecting points, users can level up to different levels – from Newbies to Masters. There are also points available for non-Pulse activities such as correctly adhering to the iterative development process (IDP) or through learning more about our products by watching a training video and taking a quick test.

The team actually used the concepts from a Bartle Test to design how different users can approach their path to earning the most points in a way that best suits their personality. Richard Bartle defined four types of game users: Achievers, Explorers, Socializers and Killers. This concept has since been used by many game developers and so our team designed the Leaderboard with something to offer for each gamer type. Being a friendly Canadian company, they have renamed the gamer types into something a bit more politically correct.

James Knight, Trevor Sharpe and Quinton Roberts - the Leaderboard development team

The results are more than promising. The Leaderboard has been the buzz for weeks on Pulse and when it had gone to beta, available to the IT team only, outsiders like me had to beg to be invited (Google doesn’t have a lock on scarcity marketing tactics). After just a couple of weeks of the beta test, the IT level of active participation was well above 60% which is significantly higher than the current average in the rest of the company. And the users are truly engaged – many competing with fervor to beat their co-workers. The “side effect” is more communication, employee engagement, and expertise sharing which is what Pulse is all about. As the OpenText CIO Steve Hunt told me: “It's like cyber crack .... They’re hooked!”.

Why We Acquired Global 360

Yesterday, OpenText announced the acquisition of Global 360. As we are expanding our market reach into the business process management (BPM) market, Global 360 adds a complementary set of technologies to OpenText’s portfolio and strengthens the OpenText partnership with Microsoft. With the combination of Metastorm and Global 360, we are now the largest provider of BPM solutions for the Microsoft ecosystem. The BPM solutions complement our existing information governance and archiving solutions for SharePoint and Exchange. But what’s more important, Global 360 increases the critical mass of process management focus inside of OpenText.

The OpenText ECM Suite already included solutions for Transactional Content Management (TCM), which is a close cousin of BPM. OpenText has long provided offerings for scanning and imaging, our own optical character recognition (OCR) engine and fax server (RightFax). Many of the OpenText solutions offered in the SAP and Oracle ecosystems are based on TCM – Accounts Payable, Employee File Management or Travel Receipts Management, etc. And of course, OpenText provides the secure compliance infrastructure that many transactional solutions require.

Not long ago, OpenText acquired Metastorm which added BPM capabilities together with cloud-based process design, business process analysis (BPA) and enterprise architecture (EA) software. Now, Global 360 brings additional capabilities particularly around dynamic case management (DCM), cloud-based process discovery and process analytics and reporting.

The Global 360 acquisition is unique, though, as it allows OpenText to not only expand its offerings, but also reach a critical mass needed to establish itself as a serious contender in a new market. This is not a minor matter. Acquiring companies successfully is not easy, and for a billion dollar vendor like OpenText, acquiring a smaller company could easily result in “swallowing it up” without much tangible impact. One way to prevent this is to fold the acquired organization into an existing group that sponsored the acquisition in the first place.

That happens, for instance, when a company acquires a smaller vendor to accelerate its technology investment or to add services capacity. Such was the case with the recent OpenText acquisition of weComm. OpenText already had a mobility group that needed to address the challenge of cost-effectively supporting multiple mobile platforms. weComm addresses that problem and was naturally combined with the existing mobility group.

When a company branches out into an adjacent space, however, there may not be a group that would be a logical home for the acquired company. In fact, the acquired company is expected to become such group. By buying Metastorm in February 2011, OpenText made a move into the BPM market. According to the analysts, Metastorm is a leading player in BPM which represents a natural expansion opportunity for OpenText. After all, many BPM solutions depend on content.

And now, by combining Metastorm, Global 360 and the existing TCM solutions, OpenText has one of the broadest product portfolios and one of the largest and most experienced teams in the world of BPM. The acquisition not only puts us on the BPM map, it makes us one of the strongest players in terms of market share, number of customers, and market presence. And, the BPM products and people won’t go unnoticed within OpenText as the business process management DNA now represents a significant portion of the company.

That’s why we’ve acquired Global 360.

Did You Just Tweet That?

I've spoken at a conference recently and just like most conferences lately, the discussion turned inevitably to social media at some point. Such conversations are always fun since I enjoy the diversity in people's opinions - from absolute addicts to the cynical denialists.

But at some point someone asked me if I was tweeting during the conference and I of course admitted that yes, I did. I like to tweet at a conference for multiple reasons:

1. Repeating a key point in writing helps me to remember it. This is Notes Taking 2.0, even if Twitter doesn't make it easy to go back to your notes after a while.
2. Sharing some of the key points of wisdom allows me to contribute to the community of my followers - those who didn't make it to the conference can get some of the key messages.
3. And then there is the personal branding aspect - tweeting about a particular session shows that I care about the subject and makes me part of the club and attracts like-minded followers.

Now, the other question that was raised is how polite is it to tweet while I am at a conference. Is it impolite to the presenter to see people staring at their iPhones or iPads? Is it socially acceptable to my co-workers or friends who are there with me? Am I just not paying attention?

Hobnobbing with Tony Clement

Recently, I was on a panel at a RTNDA conference (Radio and Television News Directors Association) and on the panel after me was no one else than Tony Clement, Canada's federal minister of industry. Mr. Clement is very much in touch with the Internet and technology and he's a very frequent, interesting and authentic Twitter user. Unlike many other politicians, he doesn't have a PR staffer do it on his behalf. Tony Clement tweets himself.

At the RTNDA panel, he was tweeting straight from the stage. I was in the audience and I've exchanged a couple of tweets with him as he was right there on the stage. And you know what, you can't accuse him that he wasn't paying attention when he was being asked a question.

Tony Clement (3rd from the right) tweeting while on a panel. And why not?

With social media and mobility, our culture is evolving. The mobile device is much more personal and intimate than a laptop which was always seen as a work tool. And working while listening to others is always a little rude (yeah, yeah, I like multitasking too). But using a personal communication device in the company of others is becoming much more acceptable.

I still don't think that it is acceptable in a one on one conversation and I certainly don't get away with it at the dinner table. Some of it needs to stay that way. But we don’t need to look far to see the future. Asia has been far ahead of North America in mobility and so is Europe. And we've all seen the pictures of packed trains in Tokyo with every passenger staring at their mobile device. While the culture in Japan might be different, mixing the in-person and the virtual social engagements will be becoming more and more the norm.

Is Device Convergence Happening?

A few days ago, a report by Pew Internet came out that revealed a surprising statistic about e-readers. According to the data Pew presented, e-readers such as Kindle and Nook have reached a 12% penetration among the US adult population. That’s actually not bad even though it is far behind other devices such as mobile phones (83%), laptops (56%), and MP3 players (44%). But this number is way ahead of the tablet penetration which is still relatively low with 8%.

That effectively means that the iPad didn’t at all manage to kill the Kindle. I must admit, that when the iPad first arrived, I thought it would mean the end of the Kindle. You can read books on the iPad and Amazon even provides a very good Kindle reader app for iPad. And after all, how much does Amazon really care about the Kindle? They make money no matter what device I read their books on, right?.

I suppose the e-book readers are doing so well because they are really good at what they have been designed for. They are single-purpose devices optimized for their job. For reading books, some of their advantages include the screen that allows reading in bright sun light, the ease of e-books dowloading and, my favorite, the light weight. All the tablets I have tested so far are too heavy for reading in bed. Kindle is featherlight with its 241 grams (8.5 oz) and it makes reading in bed easier than with a paperback.

This is really begging the question about convergence. Are we going to end up with a single device that can do it all or are we going to keep a multitude of devices? Convergence is definitely appealing, if nothing more than to eliminate the clutter of power chargers and adapters that I complained about while packing for vacation last summer. But having the right tool for the right job is unquestionably not a bad approach either.

Are we going to dump the e-reader and read on an iPad? Maybe, if it becomes lighter and learns how to handle the glare. Or maybe the e-book readers will add the apps and blur the line between tablets and e-readers.

But how about the convergence of other devices? Do I no longer need a watch because I have a smartphone that can tell the time? Well, I am really attached to my mechanical watch. Are we going to throw away the GPS and use the iPhone instead? Yes, it works, but the dedicated GPS is still a little easier to use while driving. How about the laptop that I keep schlepping around together with my iPad? If I had a keyboard and a mouse, I could perhaps get rid of it. Couldn't I?

Well, I don’t know what the answer is but I do know that the key is going to be the user experience. The simplicity and compromise-less user experience - software and hardware - will determine whether or not a particular device will converge. If a device doesn’t give me the right experience, the convergence won’t happen, even if the functionality is there.

QR Code Obsession

Last week, I was at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston which is a major conference and trade show for the 2.0 crowd. The conference was a bit different than last year – with a new, bigger venue and a much stronger presence from the ECM vendors. On the buzzwords front, “Facebook for the enterprise” is out while “social business” and “social analytics” are in. It was fun to catch up on all the 2.0 buzz!

You should try this one!

One of the new trends I’ve seen was the growing use of QR codes. QR codes are 2-dimensional bar-codes that contain small amounts of valuable information such as URLs, contact data, geographic coordinates, Wi-Fi network information, SMS, or a text message. Compared to regular bar codes, QR codes can contain much more data. That comes in handy with mobile devices since most of us don’t like to type on them due to the small keyboard size. QR codes provide a great shortcut as they allow us to capture data via the built-in camera. The QR code reader app analyzes quickly the captured image, extracts the data – and in most cases acts on it immediately. For example, when the QR code contains an URL, the reader takes us directly to that URL in the browser.

QR codes are obviously hugely effective anywhere the traditional bar codes worked well. You need to order a spare part? Just scan the QR on the broken part and the app brings you straight to the right catalog entry. Do you need to keep track of patient records in a hospital? Use the QR code on her wristband to check all the drugs, procedures and materials she used. Do you need to locate the right crate in a warehouse? Just scan the QR code in the physical records application and off you go.

Unlike bar-codes, however, QR codes are much more mobile and don’t require any proprietary reader device – you can download one of many free apps onto the smartphone that you already own. That enables many new use cases. For example, airlines started using QR codes as a paperless boarding pass. Real estate companies started sticking them onto the “for sale” signs in front of a house to give you an on the spot tour of the property, eliminating those rain-soaked fliers. For marketers, QR codes can serve as a virtual coupon, offering you an interesting on-site promotion and taking you straight to the purchase page with a single snap.

At the tradeshow, I was surprised by two things. The first is that even though the QR codes are becoming pretty omnipresent in advertising, most people didn’t know what they were and didn’t have a QR code reader installed on their smartphone. This is the geek crowd, the intellectual elite of the enterprise 2.0 world, the folks who are always connected and on top of the latest market trends.  That makes me wonder how effective those QR codes on billboards are. Most likely, the number of clicks is rather dismal.

The other thing that surprised me was that many of the QR codes splattered on the banners were just taking me to a marketing web page. I’m standing in front of a booth where I could see a live demo and talk to real people and, instead, they expected me to just check out their web site? I didn’t need to come to the trade show to do that. To their credit, though, several of the QR codes I tried took me to a page offering some sort of value – a free analyst report (great) or a white paper (not that great).

Clearly, the marketing use of QR codes is still in their infancy. Over time, we will likely get a much higher population of users with QR code readers installed and using them readily. And we will develop marketing tactics that will make it worthwhile snapping pictures of QR codes. Or perhaps we will use some completely different technology. How about implanted RFID chips or the omnipresent retina scanners like in the movie Minority Report? We’ll see. For now, I encourage you to get a QR code reader – I use i-nigma although most readers I tested were just as good. Try it out!

PS: BTW, you can generate your QR codes yourself with many online generators. I like this one: http://zxing.appspot.com/generator/

Semantic Search at the Globe and Mail

Recently, I had the opportunity to meet with Kevin Schlueter, enterprise architect at the Globe and Mail. The Globe and Mail is one of Canada’s largest newspapers and they run one of the largest Web sites in Canada. Kevin told me an interesting story that I thought was worth sharing.

The Globe and Mail runs one of Canada's largest news sites

Newspapers live from advertising and so they are keenly interested in attracting the largest possible audience and keeping the readers on their site as long as possible. People usually come to a newspaper Web site to find some specific information. This becomes particularly relevant in times of significant events of interest - such as the recent federal elections in Canada. While the home page usually provides up-to-date information about the main election race, most users are also interested in their particular candidates and so they search for them.

Search optimization became very critical for the Globe and Mail. Since a newspaper is in the information selling business, the goal was stated as “show me what I want to know even if I don’t ask for it”. And this is the tricky part - exposing the readers to relevant articles that the user will likely be interested in. And that’s why the Globe and Mail employed semantic technology.

Semantic search is the next level of searching. The basic search is looking for the most statistically prominent keywords that are contained in the text body. It can find out about who, what, when, where, and perhaps even why. Full text search is often augmented by a metadata search which can reveal information such as the author, section, page, or publication data. But a semantic search can leverage automatically generated semantic metadata which is information about topics, people, places, products and concepts.

With semantic metadata, a reader can search for an article about a particular topic - say the Canada’s Governor General David Johnston. Unlike Wayne Gretzky, David Johnston is a fairly common name and a conventional search would find a whole bunch of them. Just try to google that name.  This is where a semantic search helps by identifying correctly all relevant concepts - such as the David Johnston who is Canada’s GG, the one who’s a Harvard professor, or the one who’s a known author and journalist. These concepts can be either presented to the reader as options or they can be used to deliver the content relevant in a given context.

You may think that this is what the online retailers have been doing for years - recommending similar products based on your current selection. But there is a big difference here. The retailers work with product catalogs which contain very structured data. When you are looking at a pair of shoes, the retailer can automatically recommend another five pairs in your size that are similar but perhaps a little more stylish (aka expensive). All of that is based on defined database fields. The semantic search can make such associations based on information contained in unstructured text in an article or a group of articles which is much more difficult.

Papers are changing

And that’s exactly what the Globe and Mail is doing - using the semantic search technology to generate semantic metadata that improves search results, increases search engine optimization (SEO), and makes the site more “sticky”. And stickiness means more advertising revenue which is what the paper lives from.

According to Kevin, it works really well as he could see during the recent election when the traffic on the site peaked to over 12,000 hits per second after the first results were published. Kevin plans on additional uses for the semantic search technology such as faceted navigation, similarity, or automatically generated topic pages. All that to keep the Globe and Mail site competitive in the Canadian news business.

Quo Vadis, RIM?

Everybody is talking about RIM today and I simply have to comment. I have written several articles about RIM in the past. Over a year ago, I have suggested the 10 Reasons Why Microsoft Should Acquire RIM. A few months back, I have also wondered why does RIM keep chasing the consumers instead of focusing on their traditional strengths in the enterprise. RIM is the largest employer here in Waterloo, ON and so I do care.

RIM is in trouble and there is no way to hide it. Having discovered the killer mobile app - email - a decade ago, RIM has completely missed the notion that we could use the BlackBerry for more things than just email. Apple entered the market back in 2007 and completely transformed it with some 400,000 apps available for the iPhone. The result is a dramatic loss in market share which is now inevitably followed by revenue shortfall.

Here is RIM's problem: declining marketshare.

The question on everyone's mind is what will happen next with RIM. I see three possible scenarios:

1. Turn-around
In this ideal scenario, RIM will find a way to compete with compelling devices but that won't be enough. RIM will need to attract developers and get quickly to some 100,000 apps. That won't be easy since the developers have to divide their precious resources between supporting iOS, Android, RIM and now Microsoft and HP are also vying for their attention - and with much deeper pockets. And even the application support may not be enough. RIM will need to add some exclusive or at least unique and compelling content and services. The mobile battle ground is no longer about devices but entire eco-systems. Apple has got music and movies, Google has search and ads, and even Microsoft has the Xbox games. What will be RIM’s angle? My suggestion would be enterprise content and enterprise apps but that hasn’t been RIM’s focus lately.

2. Acquisition
The voices suggesting that RIM will be acquired were loud yesterday. The Wall Street Journal even declared Microsoft the most likely suitor. While I suggested that a year ago, I don’t see that scenario as likely in the next 12 months. Microsoft is right now in a committed relationship with Nokia and that relationship would have to fail before Microsoft could pursue RIM with a straight face. And honestly, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Microsoft built an awesome and differentiated mobile operating system and appears to be quite determined to make it a success. However, they still have to get those 100,000 apps - here they face the same challenge as RIM.

There are, of course, other possible suitors who could be interested in RIM. Cisco could use it to boost its unified communications agenda - and to add some additional load on those routers.  Oracle has surprisingly not articulated any mobile strategy so far and buying RIM would be a shot in the arm, particularly given Oracle’s laser focus on the enterprise. IBM has also been waiting on the sidelines and could use a mobile platform. And even Google could acquire RIM, swap the OS and use it as a foray into the enterprise market. And let’s not forget other big players in the IT market: Dell, Intel, Lenovo, etc. I just hope it’s not going to be Computer Associates or some cable company.

3. Demise
The 3rd, least attractive scenario is a slow - or maybe not that slow - demise. Vicious cycle of falling market shares, declining revenues, and lay-offs could lead to RIM following in the footsteps of Palm. Sure, even Palm got eventually acquired by HP but at the time, Palm was already pretty much irrelevant. And if RIM doesn’t make some radical changes, this scenario could really happen.

I sincerely hope it won’t come to a demise of RIM and that RIM turns things around. RIM is a great company and the world will be a better place with an independent player keeping the big vendors honest. Acquisition by the right company would not be a bad outcome either. I still believe that Microsoft would have been the best fit but as I explained above, this scenario is less likely now than it was when I have suggested it in April 2010.

It sure will be interesting to watch this market play out.

The Software Alone Won't Make You Social

I hear about many organizations that struggle with taking advantage of the power of social media. The first problem is of course buying into the idea that social media isn’t a waste of time. The second, far larger problem, is to get users to actually use the software and become social with their colleagues.  Yes indeed, deploying social software alone will not make you social. The ultimate goal must be to use the technology to raise employee productivity by increasing the level of social collaboration across the enterprise.

Many organizations, however, do not have an inherently social DNA. Sometimes, it is the focus on individual accomplishments that has created an individualistic culture. Other times, the nature of the business has historically not stimulated collaboration across teams. And sometimes, organizations that have gone through years of tough times, develop a culture where employees compete with each other and their primary instinct isn’t to share and collaborate but to horde information to make themselves indispensable. Such survivalist behavior is at odds with the openness and team spirit that social software can stimulate.

There is often a big difference between various functions and groups in the organization. Typically, particular groups embrace social media quickly while others remain in denial. This is where the organization needs to focus on adoption. There are various approaches that an organization can apply to stimulate the adoption. For example, the organization should suck into the social software as much already existing profile data as possible from other applications. Employees should be encouraged to post their pictures. Or, the pictures should be automatically imported from the employee badge database. Nothing makes veterans update their profiles faster than when they find out that their 10 year old badge picture is visible to all of their colleagues.

These tricks are based on a simple realization. Unlike in the consumer space, the enterprise social media knows all of its users already. They are the company’s employees and their user accounts already exist. We don’t need to convince them to join in - we can make them part of the application automatically since we know who they are. As a result, the early adopters of the social software can mention anybody in the enterprise by their user name - which then sends the mentioned user an alert. And when people see that they are being spoken about on a social site, they will come to check it out.

The adoption of social media in the enterprise has a few advantages over the public social media. It does not happen automatically though, particularly not in organizations that are historically not very social. In the end, however, the greatest driver is the corporate culture. If the culture hasn’t been very social, the management really needs to take this issue on and work towards a change. The best place to start is leading by example: when management starts communicating via social media, employees follow.

Email Isn’t Dying Yet

For a while now, social pundits have been tolling the bell for email. Pointing out that email is ineffective and out of control, they proclaim the upcoming demise of email which is to be replaced by social software. I agree that email has been used and abused by many people to do many things that it has never been designed for. Indeed, email is not a suitable team collaboration tool and yet we all have probably attempted to use it for team collaboration at some point - often with frustrating results. Email has also not been designed for file sharing and still we all keep sending out attachments every day. However, email has several things going for it that, I believe, will keep it around for a long time:


1. Unique identity
The world of social media is pretty messy when we consider identity. I have an ID on Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Xing, Ping, and many other social services. None of them talk to each other well and having to create my identity with yet another profile on each one of the services leads to severe limitations in my experience. While there have been attempts to establish a common ID (e.g. via the Open ID Foundation), those attempts are still in their infancy. In the end, all the social services fall back on my email address because that is a unique and consistent way of identifying me.

2. Single inbox
With all the services that I subscribe to, I am expected to regularly check in several times a day to catch up on the news from my social network. I may actually do that several times a day on Twitter and Facebook but it is hardly realistic to keep track of multiple accounts. In the enterprise, the situation is similar with all the different social services such as Dropbox, Box, Yammer, SharePoint, Lync, Salesforce Chatter, SAP StreamWork or OpenText Pulse.  That’s why all these vendors rely on email alerts to inform me that someone has posted a note for me on a social site. In fact, Twitter recently expanded the use of email alerts which indicates that social networks aren’t winning this particular battle. Email has managed to achieve what no other software managed to do yet – it trained me to come looking for new messages on a regular basis.

3. Targeted messages
Email is not a very good collaboration tool. Collaboration is about multiple persons jointly working on a task. When you receive those endless and frustrating email threats that keep CCing everyone, whether it’s relevant or not, you know that someone is using email for the wrong purpose. Social software can improve such collaboration significantly. However, email is a very effective way for any one-to-one and one-to-many communication. If I don’t expect a task to be worked on by a team, email is the right way to communicate to that team. Sure, I can send a “message” on Facebook but that’s really just email. Besides, Facebook sends me a real email to alert me about this message. Maybe, the new generation of millennials can do all their work on Facebook and not use email at all. But there is nothing wrong with using email – when used for the right type of communication.

While I agree that email has many shortcomings, social media is not a panacea. I keep hearing complaints from people who get too many emails. Well folks, sorry to tell you, but you can just as well get too many messages in your social site. You can find a lot spam in your social networks and, if you are a poor communicator, social media isn’t going to save you. Social software has created tremendous opportunities for team collaboration but no, I don’t believe that it will make email obsolete anytime soon.