Email is so 2000

I read somewhere that Warren Buffett likes to keep his schedule simple and it's been in the back of my mind all semester. I long for simplicity and focus, but the modern MBA pulls you in so many different directions.

So much of the communication, planning, calendaring, and collaboration happens on email that it's hard to remember that not-so-long-ago email was not a central part of education. In high school, our computer lab didn't even offer internet access. By the time I got to Stanford, we used T1 connections in our dorm rooms and libraries, because the campus hadn't yet gone wireless. We were using a good bit of email and instant messenger, of course, but it was not a fundamental component of education. And it was our generation that brought social networking into its own while we were undergrads.

But as surely as email is absolutely fundamental to the MBA, it's also a bit dated. It's entirely inefficient--linear, asynchronous, static. And in a world that's shifting from the personal processor to the "cloud," sending around attachments seems almost archaic.

Over the last couple weeks, I had the great pleasure of working with Novell's marketing organization on some of the messaging for its new collaboration platform--Pulse. It's like Google Wave, but truly made for the enterprise (and in fact, the products are interoperable). Google calls Wave "what email would look like if it was invented today." I agree and believe these are disruptive technologies that will render email obsolete in short order. And while older generations complain that these products promote information overload and find them distracting and overwhelming, younger generations already find email underwhelming. The Times, They Are A-Changin'.