Can't believe all the hate I see here. I agree with the Verge writers. Email is slowly dying. Slack looks awesome. - vicentedepierola1
The Verge had recently show signs of serious weakening (and lots of advertisement, see this comment2 for a really good opinion on this) but the Slack is killing email3 had really angered me.
Our world, especially the IT world have a tendency to reinvent everything - and I do mean everything. We're lucky that the fundamentals of the web was put down early enough by smart people that it cannot really be changed, otherwise we'd be in a constantly changing chaos. The linked article is embracing a newcomer chat service (!) that it's killing e-mail in their opinion.
This is ridiculous. If any kind of instant messaging could be able to do that, it would have already happened by now. No one, especially companies should not trust external services with important communication systems. These are paid or "free" services which you know nothing about apart from the "lickable", eye-candy interface. Deploying a Zentyal4 box, and iRedMail5 VPS, or a Zimbra6 instance is not hard at all, not even pricy. They are all Free and Open and they all have the advantage of having your data on your box, with your rules instead of a service that might easily give them away for some commercial purpose.
There are good, trustworthy technologies around; email is one of them. The whole e-mail ecosystem is extremely fault-tolerant, usually redundant, well-known and not overcomplicated. It can be extended, with additions like DKIM, GPG signatures, it could be encrypted, and so on. And there are also mailing lists, where archives could be opened for public and could save people from trying to solve issues others already had faced. Another one is XMPP, if you want instant messaging; there is a reason why Hangouts and Facebook are both accessible through XMPP. It can be extended with media upload option, with voice and video gateway, but I do admit, this last one is tricky.
Don't get me wrong, I'm interested in new technologies. I just don't understand why the constant battle to replace the good ones with eye-candy and why communication is becoming more important than actual work for many.
(Oh, by the way: this entry was written by Peter Molnar, and originally posted on petermolnar dot net.)
