Will Millennials Use Email?

Email is not going away, isn’t dead, and won’t be dead for a long time, says Media Post's Loren McDonald. The statement might seem odd, except it occurs after a panel of college-age Internet users at the Email Insider Summit.

One of the difficulties, when trying to predict how enterprise communicatons might change as Millennials enter the workforce, is precisely the fact that most of them are not in the active, full-time workforce.

Just as a "lone eagle" professional does not need a full enterprise-grade, premises-based phone system, so a college student has no need for one either. So it is hard to extrapolate from one stage of life pursuits to another than requires collaboration with other people in an existing social ecosystem, with established rules for communicating.

Today, the commonplace and accurate observation is that instant messaging and text messaging are preferred over email. But pre-workforce users will change as their life circumstances change.

That doesn't mean "nothing important will change." At a minimum, Millennials will retain the IM and texting habit for purely "personal" communications, even if they get used to email for business-related communications.

Beyond that, the additional implications are hard to predict.