There’s a horde of startups trying to replace email.

Some of these apps, like Slack (which we use at Business Insider), take a chat-room approach.

There are enterprise messaging apps that work like Snapchat, like Cotap and TigerText.

Some mobile-first productivity apps like Quip imagine that we’ll communicate directly in the documents we’re working on.

They’re all wrong.

According to the latest research conducted by the Pew Center Internet Project, 61% of American workers now say that email is “very important” for doing their job.

That number hasn’t moved at all in 13 years. As the researchers put it:

As early as 2002, Pew Research Internet surveys showed that 61% of American workers were using email at work. In 2008, we reported that 62% of working American adults were “networked workers,” meaning they used the internet or email in the workplace….Email’s vital role has withstood major changes in other communications channels such as social media, texting, and video chatting. Email has also survived potential threats like phishing, hacking and spam and dire warnings by commentators and workplace analysts about lost productivity and email overuse.

Why is email so resilient? The report doesn’t go into that, but it’s pretty obvious:

There are some ways email is used that aren’t perfect. For instance, a lot of people use their email inbox as a to-do list, even though it’s hard to organize and items sometimes fall through the cracks. Here, a tool built for workflow, like Asana, may end up being better.

But for day-to-day communication, email is not going away.

Original source: Business Insider UK

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