Bulls in Email's China Shop

Steve Gillmor, myself and a few others got to wander around the INBOX email event like Pamplona Bulls in a china shop. Talking about how the death of email, workspace alternatives and calling into question ways of reforming the modality.

While INBOX wrestles with the intractable problems of blurred international boundaries, too-complex authentication solutions and too-expensive computational and payment schemes, more and more of us are routing around e-mail for all but the most basic services.

He penned this post in reaction to a presentation by the CEO of ePeople, which we practically hijacked into a conversation on control. The sound logic is that most enterprise knowledge exists in email, but enterprises benefit little from it. But their solution is to impose structure -- creating DRM for email.

A sender can determine who can read and what forward rights exist, for example. Now, this is a good solution for specific cases such as Clinical Trials and other heavily regulated contexts where control is paramount. I am sure they are selling well and wish them the best, but the danger is once the platform is deployed, control-oriented managers may seek to use this instrument more broadly.

Because email is breaking due to spam, viruses, monoculture and occupational spam -- people are searching for alternatives. This isn't to say that email won't live on, just it won't be the email we know and love. Email's problems stem from its openness, but the solution has to be more of a golden mean than an extreme.

I argued that DRM destroys value, the role of knowledge sharing is innovation and restricting sharing could have a greater downstream effect on enterprise value than the benefits of short term rules a sender generates. What's worse is an email user can always copy and paste to arbitrage the restrictions a system imposes. And as Steve points out, when IT doesn't fulfill or restricts needs, people self-provision and route around. This isn't just a case of people breaking rules, its unpragmatic policy.

While 90% of email is monitored and it is a corporate asset, without benevolence that encourages contribution to the asset, people generate their own until its time to leave and take it with them. Part of the social dynamics that lead teams to innovate for benefit of their organization is how the organization fosters sharing -- both with employees and the institution. Organizations can benefit from commons-based peer production if they are willing to give up some centralized control.