At the end of November ABC posted an article stating Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos (formerly known as Atos Origin), wants to move to a “Zero-mail” policy for it’s internal communications. Mr Breton is not the first one to come up with this plan but his claim that he has not sent an email in the last three years seems somewhat far fetched… Now not to call him a liar I’ll go from the assumption that his secretary has been sending those emails (Don’t we love the send-on-behalf function?).

Truth of the matter is that he does have, remarkably enough, a point. Most emails being sent are spam and even more are pointless. But to remove email all together from the picture is a bridge too far and I believe that Mr Breton is well aware of that.  Whilst what he declared will not be a hoax but more a way of actually putting his company in the picture. (results have been a bit negative for Atos: source).

Now to come to Thierry’s point is that we will be seeing a paradigm shift in the following years, but let’s face that this shift has already been coming for a while and that the IT industry as a whole changes every couple of years. As a platform for knowledge sharing and fast communications email is insufficient. But this is known by all Techies (yeah I capitalised Techies!) and, dare I say, the general public.

Instant communications have been used in companies for years, the application only varied. I have, personally, chatted with colleagues through ICQ, MSN, Skype, Office Communicator and Lync. The chances that other people have used AOL, Yahoo or google chat are substantial. The only thing we could complain about is that the integration with other platforms was quite poor.

Looking at it from a Microsoft perspective we have now have integration between Sharepoint, Lync and Exchange. Integration that allows us to implement a better platform for sharing knowledge, fast communication with our colleagues and sending messages that are important. Let’s face it, official communication with our clients will not go through a chat window. Not for a while at least…

So to address the title of this post: No, I do not believe email is going the way of the Dodo. I do believe that companies will be rethinking, or at least should rethink, their communication policies for both internal and external traffic. The article that inspired this “rant” jumps to conclusions and totally misses the point of what is going on.