Death of Email?

Interesting article: Tech Firm Implements Employee ‘Zero Email’ Policy 

You’ve got mail–not. Employees of tech company Atos will be banned from sending emails under the company’s new “zero email” policy.

Atos is evaluating a number of new tools to replace internal email including collaborative and social media tools. Those include the Atos Wiki, which allows all employees to communicate by contributing or modifying online content, and Office Communicator, the company’s online chat system which allows video conferencing, and file and application sharing. 

Is this beginning of the end for email? Will social networking and IM strike a death-knell for email like the automobile did to the horse and buggy (or more recently, what digital photography did to print)


Not surprisingly the first blow is being struck by a French company. A decade ago the French had launched a war against the word "email" which they considered as a brutal Anglo incursion on their chaste French environment (first McDonald's and then email, what was the world coming to) 

Goodbye "e-mail," the French government says, and hello "courriel" — the term that linguistically sensitive France is now using to refer to electronic mail in official documents.

The Culture Ministry has announced a ban on the use of "e-mail" in all government ministries, documents, publications or websites, the latest step to stem an incursion of English words into the French lexicon.

And also not surprisingly, the CEO of Atos, Thierry Breton is no fan of email, he has not sent one in the last 3 years.