Email and Slack

Evolving entertainment needs for the “bored office worker”

Some questions I’ve been thinking about today:

• Does email become more valuable (less stressful) if workers continue to adopt Slack / Hipchat / office messaging solutions as email replacements?
• Are office messaging solutions potential new platforms to deliver media into? What does the bored office worker want to do — stay in platform, or move off to other contexts? Both probably?
• Extending that thinking, does email evolve to become a place to consume longer form content / entertainment? Is this why email newsletter startups are seeing a resurgence in the past year?

Email is really such an underrated technology, perfect for the mobile-first world we all live in. The first M&A deal I ever worked on was Daily Candy (sold to Comcast in 2008), and it’s fascinating to see the rise of theSkimm, theLeadSports, etc. almost a decade later. My current thinking is that email will be much less important for work, but more important as a preferred marketing and entertainment medium.