Email Is The New Pony Express--And It's Time To Put It Down

By Ryan Holmes

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October 16, 2012

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Email, like paper letters delivered by horseback, has become an unproductivity tool and may just be the biggest time killer in the modern workplace. Here's where companies are headed next.

In early 2011, the CEO of a French IT company issued an usual memorandum. He banned email. Employees were discouraged from sending or receiving internal messages, with the goal of eradicating email within 18 months. Critics scoffed. Workers rebelled. But Thierry Breton, the CEO of Atos, has stuck to his guns, reducing message volume by an estimated 20%. His company, by the way, has 74,000 employees in 48 countries.

( Imagine: A workday without e-mail. To office workers everywhere struggling to stem the tide of messages filling their inbox, it probably sounds too good to be true.

But a French tech company wants to make it a reality. Calling the volume of its e-mail "unsustainable," IT services firm Atos Origin plans to ban internal e-mail from company communications within two years. Instead, employees will communicate mostly through instant-messaging tools or wiki-like documents that can be edited by multiple users online. "We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives," said Atos CEO Thierry Breton in a statement earlier this year. "At Atos Origin we are taking action now to reverse this trend." The issue gained new traction last week when Breton gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal in which he said he hadn't sent a work e-mail in three years. "If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message," he told the newspaper. "Emails cannot replace the spoken word." Breton estimates that only 10% of the 200 messages his employees receive on an average day are useful, and that 18% is spam. Managers spend between 5 and 20 hours a week reading and writing e-mails, he says. Atos has 74,000 employees in 42 countries. An Atos spokeswoman said response to Breton's policy has been "positive" and that the company has reduced its volume of internal e-mails by 20 percent in six months. If trends are any indication, Atos may be on to something. Recent surveys have found e-mail use declining rapidly among younger people who prefer faster, less formal means of communication such as texting or instant messaging on Facebook or Twitter. "Atos' decision ... is perhaps the most ringing endorsement yet for the notion that email is being gradually phased out of [the workplace]," wrote BonitaSoft CEO Miguel Valds Faura on the tech blog GigaOm. "It will be interesting to see how many other large scale organizations will follow in its footsteps over the next several years." Interesting indeed. Many harried employees may welcome such an experiment -- unless it means more time spent in meetings. )

Email is familiar. Its comfortable. Its easy to use. But it might just be the biggest killer of time and productivity in the office today. Ill admit my vendetta is personal. I run a company, HootSuite, which is focused on disrupting how the world communicates using social media. Yet each day my employees and I send each other thousands of emails, typing out addresses and patiently waiting for replies like we were mailing letters on the Pony Express. As weve expanded from 20 to 200 employees over the last two years, the headaches have only grown. Anyone with an inbox knows what Im talking about. A dozen emails to set up a meeting time. Documents attached and edited and reedited until no one knows which version is current. Urgent messages drowning in forwards and cc's and spam.

Its not just me who thinks emails days are numbered. (In fact, AOL is quietly working on a major email overhaul that wold look like mashup of Twitter, Pinterest, and Gmail.) Among 18-24 year olds, time spent on webmail has declined 34% in the last year alone, and nearly 50% since 2010, according to comScores 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus report.

So what's the solution? Our idea: Turn email into a conversation. Get rid of the inbox. Build an online platform where departments can post and respond to messages on central discussion threads, Facebook-style. Then integrate that with Twitter and Facebook so great ideas can be broadcast--with a click--to the world. Conversations isnt a revolutionary concept; its a duhits-about-time concept. And its worked for us and 5 million clients. A year from now, we may well be reading email its last rites. Heres why: Email has become an unproductivity tool. Right now, the typical corporate user spends 2 hours and 14 minutes every day reading and responding to email, according to McKinseys 2012 Social Economy report. Our inboxes have become an open door for anything and everything, some of which is pure spam and most of which is neither time-sensitive nor relevant in the here and now. The average business user wades through 114 emails a day, which works out to 41,610 messages a year (or one email every 12.6 minutes of your life).

Email is linear, not collaborative. Email was never intended for collaborative work. Try setting up a meeting time with a group on email and that becomes painfully obvious. Messages flood in, getting out of sync and leaving users scrolling madly to track the conversation. A better option: Facebook-style discussion threads where multiple employees can post, reply, and view centrally in real time. Email is not social. Email is where good ideas go to die. Brilliant messages race across the Internet at light speed only to end up trapped in an inbox. The clear advantage of social platforms is that content is shared and reshared among whole communities of followers, triggering the viral cascade that makes social media so powerful. Using internal networks and discussion threads instead of email, enterprises can instantly broadcast innovation and crowdsource solutions company-wide. HootSuite's Conversations takes this up a notch, enabling employees to amplify select messages to Twitter and Facebook, sharing ideas with the world at a click. Your inbox is a black hole. You may be able to quickly and easily search your inbox, but odds are the rest of your department or company cant. And all that locked-up knowledge represents a massive, wasted reserve of internal expertise. Office productivity could be improved by up to 14% just by moving those emails to a searchable, central discussion thread, message board, or wiki, according to a 2012 McKinsey report. Sharing documents on email is a joke. Lets set aside the inconvenience of uploading and attaching files, over and over again. The real trouble with sharing on email starts when multiple recipients download and modify a document. Its all too easy to lose track of which revision is the latest, leading to redundant edits and wasted time. An infinitely better solution is to put a single document in one, shared location accessible to all stakeholders. Using tools like Google Drive, history can be tracked and multiple collaborators can edit simultaneously. Seeking the path of least resistance, the next generation of office workers are finding better, faster, easier ways to communicate. Its about time.

AOL's Alto Reimagines The Email Experience With A Twitter, Pinterest, Gmail Mashup
By Adam Bluestein

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October 18, 2012

Working on the hush-hush, a team of AOL developers has reconceived the way email is experienced.

Photograph by Thomas Hannich

How does it feel to throw a product launch and have nobody come? Just ask AOL. In November 2010, the company unveiled Project Phoenix, a platform intended to rev up its doddering email business. Once synonymous with email--and mailbox-cluttering installation CDs/drink coasters--AOL had been lapped by free-mail rivals Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google, and an @aol.com email address had become the tech equivalent of an AARP membership card. The goal with Phoenix was to turn that around by offering Gmailesque features such as threaded emails and built-in chat, plus new functions like the ability to update your Facebook and Twitter statuses. The company even offered alternatives to the unhip AOL domain name: @ygm.com ("you've got mail"), @games, @wow, and @love. And to maximize its usefulness, Phoenix let users aggregate any external email accounts into their AOL inbox. Phoenix landed with a thud. Existing AOL Mail users didn't see a compelling reason to switch to the platform, and--perhaps because it looked so much like Gmail--neither did many other

people. (At its peak, Phoenix had 30,000 users; currently it's chugging along with 15,000 devotees despite the fact that AOL no longer officially supports the service.)
Email hasnt had a serious rethink really since Gmail came out. We wanted to take a swing at that.

Now, with less fanfare, AOL is trying again with a platform called Alto, which launched on October 18. But unlike Phoenix, which merely tweaked the email experience, Alto is a complete reimagination of it. And here's a real shocker: AOL produced Alto through the kind of speedy, agile development process you'd associate with a startup, not a $3 billion corporation that defined web 1.0. Alto is the product of a deliberate strategy change in the wake of the Phoenix fail. David Temkin, AOL's SVP of mobile and mail, split AOL's email operations into two tracks. One group continued to work on upgrading existing AOL users via incremental improvements that were unveiled this July. The other team, working under the radar even within the company, had license to create a truly disruptive product. "Email hasn't had a serious rethink really since Gmail came out," says Temkin. "We wanted to take a swing at that and not be tethered by the existing 20 million or so people using AOL Mail. The idea was to create without scrutiny and questioning."

David Temkin, right, AOLs SVP of mobile and mail, gave Alto director Joshua Ramirez, left, and his team free rein to create an email product that looks and functions unlike any other platform. | Photo by Kevin Kunishi

Temkin assembled a cross-functional team of about a dozen developers, designers, and product managers, led by Joshua Ramirez, a senior director for product management of AOL Mail and Alto. Both Ramirez, a 37-year-old who had previously logged time at Apple, eBay, and Yahoo, and Temkin, 45, a veteran of Apple and Palm, brought fresh eyes to the project, having joined the company after the Phoenix launch. Drawing on insights gleaned from ethnographic studies of Phoenix users, they aimed to keep what people liked (aggregating multiple email accounts, for instance) and remedy what they didn't (multiple accounts also multiplied inbox clutter and email anxiety). First proposed in April 2011, Alto was slated for a beta launch the following October. "What allowed us to move so quickly was having design, development, and product constantly talk in real time," says Ramirez. "It wasn't your typical waterfall process, where you define requirements, the developers build it, hand it off to QA, and 12 months later you have a product. This was continuous development." Key details were ironed out during an off-site hackathon, in August, at a rustic retreat near Monterey, California. Says Ramirez, "We packed three weeks into six days." Visually, Alto won't be mistaken for its competition. "We wanted a product that could attract people from across a coffee shop," says Temkin, who relied on design director Bill Wetherell to create a user interface that passed "the 15-foot test." Alto is a web-based client that looks like a mashup of Twitter and Pinterest, with incoming mail showing up in a vertical feed along the left side of the page. Abutting it is a thin column of icons for basic functions (compose a message, find a contact). The right two-thirds of the window is dominated by rows of tiles called "stacks." These are the source of the platform's unique look, as well as its innovative functionality. "We wanted to provide a post-foldering approach to organization," says Ramirez. (You can create folders in Alto, but AOL's studies show that few consumers actually use them.) The stacks update dynamically and work continuously, automatically sorting incoming messages, which also appear in your main feed, into five default groupings: daily deals, social notifications, retail, photos, and attachments. These piles reflect the most common categories of email received by AOL accounts--and the fact is that even in the Facebook era, email remains the de facto beast of burden for photos and attachments. Notes Temkin, "No one's going to send bills to your Facebook account, and you're not going to get financial statements sent over text messages." Alto uses a visual search to display the content being delivered: Click on the photos or attachments stack and you get an instant array of thumbnails displaying its contents--no searching or opening of messages required. Users can also create custom stacks for subjects like travel, work projects, or family by setting simple rules for sorting by sender, domain, or keywords. There's even an option to have certain types of messages bypass the inbox altogether, instead sending them right to a stack for periodic checking. Explains Temkin, "By sifting through bulk mail, you end up with the things that really matter in your inbox." From studying Phoenix, the Alto team knew that while people like to aggregate multiple accounts, they didn't want to set up a new account in order to do so. With Alto, users can simply log in with an existing Gmail, Yahoo, .mac, or AOL account. (At least initially, Alto won't support POP3 email.) This is a platform meant to streamline your routine, not add to it.

And Now To Get The Domain Name...

There were a lot of good reasons for AOL to go with Alto as the name of its new email platform. We wanted something abstract and easy to spell that can expand beyond mail, says AOLs David Temkin. It suggests a high-level view of email and has a good history in the tech industry. (The Xerox Alto, developed in the 70s, was one of the first personal computers.) But there was a downside to the product name, too: namely, Franck Joly, a Frenchman who bought the alto.com domain back in 1995. Though he isnt using the URL, he is still the admin of it, and as of press time, hasnt responded to AOLs overtures. Its not like were offering five bucks, says Ramirez. Contacted via email, Joly writes only that there has been some strange proposition but not serious contact at this time. Translation: Before it can bring stacks of Alto email to the world, AOL may have to bring stacks of cash to France. Still in development is Alto's business model. Mail is a key driver for AOL's media properties--the default entry point for AOL Mail users is the AOL Today page, which links to top stories from the Huffington Post, Patch, and other AOL brands. Temkin insists that connecting users to content won't be as central to Alto, though there will eventually be a "top stories" stack containing news clippings that link to, say, HuffPo articles. "We're looking at ways of monetizing this product," he says. "Unlike AOL Mail, we'll likely implement premium features that you pay for on a subscription basis. AOL Mail is a purely advertisingsupported product. Alto is optimized for acquiring email users who are open to a new experience." Even if Alto grabs those users, Macquarie Capital analyst Ben Schachter says it's not likely to elevate AOL's fortunes in the short term. Although its stock price has more than doubled in 2012 and the company posted its smallest revenue decline in seven years in the second quarter--thanks largely to a $1 billion patent sale to Microsoft--AOL's revenue from display advertising on its media properties was basically flat, and its subscription-access business continued free-falling, dropping another 13%. "Efforts like new mail or video are interesting," says Schachter, "but AOL hasn't proved it can make them into meaningful businesses. Changing people's email habits is a tough thing to do." Six weeks before launch, a calm and confident-seeming Ramirez and Temkin are focused on software bugs, not business plans, making sure that the "minimal viable product" that early adopters see this fall "works well, is beautiful, and addresses the main case uses of email," says Temkin. "We're a big company and we want to rebuild a reputation for innovation. I feel we have an infinitely stronger product than we did with Phoenix--but it's best to speak softly and carry a big demo."

The Assorted Looks Of Alto

Weary of trying to keep your email organized? AOLs new platform fights fatigue with a dynamic visual solution.

SORTED FROM THE START Alto scans messages arriving in a users inbox (top) and organizes them into customizable stacks (bottom).

PHOTOS AT A GLANCE A photos stack is included as a default. Click it and you instantly get thumbnails of every image in your inbox.

SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS Alto creates a stack for notifications from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and any other social site you choose. It also provides a visual analysis of traffic from each sender.