So, why not just use WhatsApp?

The thing that makes gmail near ubiquitous is that e-mail is even more ubiquitous. And e-mail existed for a couple of decades before gmail came onto the scene. There have been many, many different companies to come along and try to corner the market on communications, but the Internet in general didn’t really start taking off until 1995 and e-mail followed quickly thereafter because it was the most common communication method that could be reasonably trusted to work everywhere. Everybody set up e-mail gateways to everything else, because e-mail was the lowest common denominator.

Frankly, it still is.

But human communications is 80-90% non-verbal, and it’s much more about the tone of voice and the body language than it is about the words themselves that are expressed.

And written literacy is still a huge problem in many places in the world.

So, I get why you want to replace e-mail.

But written communications is relatively durable. And compact. And easy to process relatively quickly. And non-linear, so that if you missed something that was expressed earlier, you can just scan back to that passage in moments.

Before we had writing, we had verbal communication and stories that were passed down from one person to the next. But they weren’t very durable, and the stories frequently changed in the retelling. And verbal communication is linear — it’s harder to skip ahead or skip backward and find the exact right passage.

Moreover, humans are generally very visual creatures, and audio-only communications gives up a lot of the benefits of written communications without having the benefit of video communications. In addition, humans typically process audio messages much slower than they can read. Sure, there’s a lot of extra context that you can convey with audio, but the core words themselves cannot be absorbed nearly as quickly.

When you get to audio recording, now bandwidth of recording and storage and transmission starts to become a factor. Sure, you can transcribe audio, but then why didn’t you just use written communications to begin with?

Video communications has all the same durability problems and recording and storage and transmission problems that audio has, but raised by orders of magnitude. But at least you then get to make use of all those additional non-verbal communications aspects that humans are genetically designed to process. On the other hand, video without audio is pretty useless, so now you’ve just added a whole ‘nother dimension to your set of problems you have to deal with.

Reading the MLK “I have a dream” speech is one thing. Hearing it is another. Watching it is yet another. But each of these systems builds on top of the preceding one, and when used together they can further enrich the message you want to convey.

That’s called multimedia.

And you can send audio messages via e-mail. Or video messages. Or you can send links to audio or video messages.

Radio stations are a purely audio form of communication. They still exist, they do have their place. TV stations are a audio-visual form of communication, and they also have their place. But so does the written word.

And e-mail can serve all of those forms of communication, either directly or via attachments or links.

And gmail is, like it or not, the current biggest e-mail provider. In 1995, that was AOL. But times change.

So, you’ve got to figure out what you can do that gmail can’t. What AOL couldn’t. What can’t be done by either Facebook or WhatsApp.