Email is not a killer app!

groupSPARK CEO Ravi Agarwal has an interesting take on Google's $625 million Postini acquisition.

"Overall the SaaS messaging space is heating up... After all, email is the killer app for SMBs...  This is the first volley from Google attacking Microsoft's hold on the lucrative messaging software for SMB's. Google ultimately wants to go after the Microsoft Exchange Server market, but hasn't much success so far getting SMB's to pay for services... Google is playing catch-up here, but clearly will pose a strong challenge to Microsoft in the future."

But email is NOT a killer app (let alone THE killer app)! Instead, what SMBs really want is a coherent, 360 degree solution for managing their front- and back-office operations. As SMBLive CEO Matt Howard puts it, running a business is all about maintaining 5 conversations: you use office productivity apps to organize your own ideas, collaboration platforms to share information with colleagues and partners, transaction and contact management tools to keep track of current vendors and customers, sales/marketing/networking services to connect with new ones...

While email can play a role in these interactions, it's a means rather than an end. A means whose usefulness may one day end. As Dennis Howlett writes on ZDNet: "I see a combination of Twitter and Facebook as having the potential to replace 90% of the email I receive while improving my personal productivity."

RedMonk (the most influential analyst firm on the web, with THREE top 10 spots on Technobabble's league table!) recently switched from Zimbra to Google Apps, a move which Stephen O'Grady described as trying out a new *collaboration platform* rather than a different messaging service. That makes me think it's Microsoft, not Google, that needs to play catch-up.

Every Google Apps account (whether paid or free) exposes new users to not just Gmail, but also Google Talk, Google Calendar and Google Docs/Spreadsheet. Sooner or later Google will integrate Google Checkout, Google Base, JotSpot, GrandCentral, etc. Google Apps is evolving into a switchboard for our 5 conversations (whether we choose to conduct them via email, wiki, IM, phone calls...). Its all-in-one-ness will turn the SaaS messaging space into a too-narrow niche for most SMBs to explore. Unless Microsoft begins bundling Office, SharePoint and everything else it's got with each Exchange Server license, it won't be able to hold on to the email market. And neither will its hosting partners.

Comments

[David Snead]

I wonder though, where do these new technologies leave people who wish to manage their public personas, or are not interested in putting it all out there ala twitter. One thing I noticed that I saw (see) as the death of IM, is that once the technology becomes corporatized, and analyzed by technophobic lawyers, it gets walled within the enterprise. How many clients have you had who were at one time instantly accessible by IM, who are now only available by e-mail? Will the same thing happen to business uses of twitter/facebook? Maybe there should be some evangelizing among the lawyer community. I nominate you.

[Isabel Wang]

Microsoft's Ray Ozzie once said that consumer technologies tend to trickle up, making their way first into smaller organizations, then large enterprises.

http://www.microsoft.com/msft/speech/FY06/OzzieFAM2006.mspx

I have not seen the IM backlash you described, but I did have a very similar experience with email adoption.

When I first graduated from college (in 1994), I worked at a company that had just started using email. At first we were officially prohibited from sending any messages to people outside the company - and given repeated warnings about the legal risks involved. But little by little, top management started caving in. First they decided it was ok to email approved contractors. Then prospective customers. Then job candidates...

So don't write off IM just yet. Twitter/Facebook might not meet with immediate approval either, but if they add value to people's work flow, the legal department will eventually relent.

[James Governor]

Isabel you know we love you right? that comment put a huge smile on my face.

to davis snead's point- one thing i only noticed after the fact in using google chat is thats indexed and searchable alongside your google mail. add that postini and suddenly you have a compliance platform, not just an email system. i hadnt even begun to think about it, but when i searched for some mail one of my IMs came up and i said to myself: "I see"...

[Isabel Wang]

Everyone knows that Redmonk is the coolest :)

I'm wondering how long it'll be before you search for some mail and the transcript from one of your phone conversations come up. You were asking if Google will ever become a "safe" IT vendor that employees know they won't get fired for buying from. If/when Google Apps becomes a totally integrated compliance platform, people might have a harder time justifying *not* using it.