You may have heard the buzz lately. Whispers on the internet that the first “killer app”, the email, is slowly dying. What is supposedly sapping the strength of mighty email, you ask? The answer - instant messaging.

The Argument For Email's Eventual Demise

The argument for email's slow death starts with the fact that only around 5% of American teens prefer email to texting. This preference, the pundits say, will stay with them as they enter the workforce, and given their preference for the increased intimacy of texting, email's days will be numbered. Even now, the business world sends billions of IM's back and forth each year, to say nothing of the tens of billions of IM's sent between teens and tweens. Before the advent of hand helds and instant messaging, almost all of that traffic would have been handled via email – or what never have taken place at all, in the case of messages between kids.

It's a good argument. A fairly compelling argument, to be sure. There's no reason to believe that today's teens will suddenly develop a fondness for email and stop texting in preference for it, and it's also a fair point that today's teens will be the backbone of tomorrow's workforce. As such, they'll set the technological agenda. The entire argument though, seems to hinge on that 5% number, and in doing so, it leaves out some fairly important additional factors.

The Argument Against Email's Eventual Demise

A preference for one over the other doesn't mean an aversion to it. In the same survey that unearthed the 5% number, teens indicated that they viewed email as the primary means of communicating with “old people and businesses”, and it is that last bit that's compelling. Teens recognize that email is still the most appropriate means of communicating with businesses, and just as they are unlikely to develop a sudden preference for email over texting, they're also unlikely to suddenly stop seeing email as the appropriate avenue of business communication and correspondence.

Further, that same study revealed that email usage is still growing, albeit more slowly than it once was. Part of this, we can assume, is because texting is being used in the place of some email traffic that once existed. However another part stems simply from the fact that there are already an awful lot of people online now, and the rate of growth new internet users has begun to decline. Put another way, the market is maturing, and a decline in the rate of growth is an expected part of market maturation.

Ultimately, the answer to the question appears to be no, but it is a “no” with a very important caveat. Email certainly won't be dying anytime soon. You can probably rely on email still being widely used for the rest of your life. Having said that though, email will come to share the stage more equally with texting. Certain forms of communication, more casual and informal, will continue to migrate to the sphere of texting, and email's primary domain will become more formalized communication. Rumors of the death of email have been greatly exaggerated.