Doom

The vast majority of people would not know good technological implementations from poor technological implementations. More than a quarter of humanity have no access to electricity and rely on wood, charcoal, or dung as their principal source of energy for cooking and heating. But that is not what we mean. This conversation today is limited to those that are supposed to know better, those that we hope know better, those who earn a first world living from, supposedly, knowing better.

Let's begin today with email.

it seems that email is falling out of favor with techy youth. According to this:

http://news.com.com/Kids+say+e-mail+is%2C+like%2C+soooo+dead/2009-1032_3-6197242.html?
tag=nefd.lede

Many young people see email as primarily a tool for "communicating with adults." What's more popular that email? Text messaging and social network sites like facebook, especially accessed from wireless phone.

Question: what is the functional difference between email on a wireless phone, and text messaging on a wireless phone?

Answer: nothing.

To be more specific, the current crop of teens and 20-somethings have grown up never having seen anything like pine, elm, mh, or mail, not that pine is great program, it's just an example. It's a handy little contrast to the most popular email platform of our age, the Microsoft Outlook and Exchange combination.

Outlook is, if not the, at least a front runner, for the worst user-space software ever created. I will not discuse why. Kids hate it, enough said.

What do kids want? Easy, there's nothing new here at all. They want something fast and easy to use to communicate with other people. They want to type messages into a device, and have those messages appear someplace else for someone else to read.

email is a protocal, SMTP. It doesn't know or care what is in in a message. It can be a simple text message, or it can be some gigantic Microsoft Word file, saved as a pdf and MIME attached along with grahical versions of emoticons and a jpeg of the senders cat in the sig, all containing exactly the same message.

Why is email in the decline among young people? This question misses the point rather badly. Communication is more important than ever among young people. They expect it. They expect fast. They expect it simple.

They don't use email because Microsoft broke it for all of us. Thanks a lot.

It make me angry. People are stupid.