Email: Killer App of the '80's to Killed App in the '00's.

Increasingly the immediate services such as SMS, TXT and IM establish a ‘social heartbeat’ that connects people when they are not physically near each other. And this has precedent in the older technologies as well: previously it was daily or weekly letters home from college students or summer campers, which evolved into regular phone calls home. SO why is it any surprise that both scale and frequency of communication have developed so that friends IM or TXT each other literally hundreds of times each day? A regular stream of short messages keeps friends top of mind and in some way involved in each other lives, as well as establishing importance and preference of friends – key social status indicators.

Critical to this communication is the ability to display presence or availability information. This is a generation that will wait until someone is online to engage them, rather than send an email and wait for a response. And for many of them, they are literally never ‘offline’. With mobile phones supporting TXT and IM, Twitter and even Facebook and MySpace updating, even sleeping is becoming an ‘online’ activity. Plus now uses have multiple means to establish presence – not just phone to phone, but phone to the world (how many Facebook or My Space friends do you have?)

So a major shift is starting that impacts service providers and telecom vendors alike: communications that is personalized, real time, multipoint and both text and video oriented.

Baby Boomers typically born between 1946 and 1964 represent approximately 30% of the population and a workforce of nearly 75 million according to the US Census. Just as we are losing the WWII generation at the rate of 1,000 a day the early "Boomers" are now reaching retirement and many are not necessarily waiting until they are 60-65. Thus corporate reliance on the multi-tasking, Type A personality habits of this generation reflects what will be an increasingly smaller market over the next 15 years. Email is getting replaced as the communication application of choice, and it is not being replaced by just one other technology. Corporations, and the service providers, need to adapt.

Age Group	Population (est from 2004 US Census)	Applications
Boomers 1945-1964	74 Million	Voice, Mobile/Fixed Email,Cable/Satellite TV, Computer IM
Gen X 1970-1986	21 Million	Voice, Mobile IM, TXT
Gen Y 1986-2003	71 Million	Mobile Video, IM/Mobile IM, Pic Msg, VOD, TXT

A major difference for XY's is the frustration they have with the technological gap between themselves and their (Boomer) parents. Many Boomer parents feel that they ‘invented’ or ‘discovered’ the internet, but it is the XY’s that have grown up with the technology, and the implementations never dreamed of by their parents. In effect, it’s the XY’s who are not only demanding, but also delivering on the promises of the internet. On-line video games, Facebook and other social networking sites, computers in classrooms are all technology implementations that grew out of the ‘free internet’ ideals of the Boomer generation.

The Post-Boomers (Gen X/Y/Millennials) are a market force that will change the world. Failing to adjust service offerings and go to market strategies accordingly will be disastrous to future business success.

Boomers may have invented the internet, but it’s the new generations of users that are making it an intricate part of their lives. And that will spell the end of email as the dominant application as we know it.