Take a look at your smart phone and apps you have installed on it. Now take a look at the software you have installed on your desktop/laptop computer. It goes without saying that you would expect all of that software — both the production software (and games) as well as the underlying operating systems — to simply become better in the next years. Say, 20 years.

You expect your Photoshop to basically do everything automatically by then. “Hey Photoshop, make me pretty” and hey presto your selfie is incredible. You expect games to be incredible, rich in storyline, graphics, connectivity. You expect holograms to project games into your room, like in the movie “Her”. You expect Facebook to become huge monster and have your animated friends run around your desk or whatever.

Simply, you expect all of your software to evolve and become — more. Why do you expect that? Well, inertia would be one good answer. If you look 20 years back, all of that software was (compared to today) of stone-age quality. And by inertia programers and designers will just make it better.

Where is email in all of that?

You can read a little bit on the history of email, and some of you reading this are old enough to remember that 20 years ago email was the same as it is today. The “To:” field, “Subject:”, body of email, some attachments, and that’s it. This was a long time ago. And it is the same today.

What the hell?

I mean, I would be seriously disappointed if 20 years from today my handling of email in day-to-day life still included me writing “To:”, “Subject:”, writing something in the body, attaching some files and clicking Send. Come on, we have so high expectations for other software and other infrastructure to develop and evolve in the next 20 years, where is email in all of that?

Alright, I know, some of you techie guys will now comment:

“Well mister, but email evolved, because in the backend we changed Ports, and Addresses, and SMTP, and POP, and Security, and SSL, and digital signatures, and we plugged some cables and rerouted some protocols…”
—John Doe, engineer

Yes, thank you techie people, I appreciate your efforts from the bottom of my heart, and I really do understand that without you whole internet would grind to a halt in about 10 minutes, and most likely World War III would erupt within the next 30 minutes. I love you guys, and do not get me wrong but for the users email did not change. It is the freaking same for decades now, and there is no evolution in sight.

“Oh wait, but there is evolution, we have Chat and Dropbox, and Mailbox and all other cool stuff!”
—Jane Doe, perceptive user

Ok, I will grant you that. There are some products which came into existence because email was not efficient enough. Chat systems that we take for granted today are offspring of email. I remember, back in the day, we used to exchange hundred of small emails a day (this was before ICQ even), and then someone figured out that instead of sending hundreds of small emails perhaps there is a better solution. I remember before Dropbox that I used to send to myself an email with attachment so I can log on to my email when I get to my friend’s house and download an attachment. Essentially I was using attachments in email as cloud storage. Crap, I am getting old.

But anyways.

Even cool apps like Mailbox are just a little bit better interfaces for email, not evolution of email as such.

And even tho this is cool, it is not actually making email any better.

Do we need new email? I look at it from the starting perspective of this rant. If in 20 years from today we will have software that does magic and then makes you coffee and irons your suit, email will need to follow up.

How? Not sure. One thought would be that various use cases for email get broken up into small fragments and embedded in each app. So instead of sending email with photo as attachment, you can just share photos with people directly from your photo album (the way iOS does it for example).

But in any case I am hoping that sometime soon there will be a team of designers and engineers sitting in the same room, sticking post-its on the wall, coming up with the next version of email.