What's wrong with email?

I recently read through this Samuel Hulick piece - Slack - I'm Breaking Up with You - and couldn't help but roll my eyes a little bit. No offense to the article itself - it's well written, entertaining and makes a solid point - but there's this continuous idea that something must replace email. If you don't recall, less than six months ago there were all sorts of articles proclaiming Slack to be the Slayer of the Great Email Beast. Now we're starting to see the backlash to that promise start to bubble up. The overwhelming nature of active chat somehow doesn't lend itself to the productivity of passive messages and people are surprised?

Let's also keep in mind that other popular services - like Asana - also claim to be better than email. It's a fine service but it's not an email replacement. It's a different inbox.

I'm sure the same has been claimed of Facebook Messenger, Kik, GroupMe, or text messaging. And there's truth to every single claim - all of those are valid ways of communicating, some more convenient than others but why does everyone insist that email must go away and be buried? This Atlantic piece does a great job of describing the landscape of modern communication but, ultimately, lands on the notion that email isn't going anywhere. Personally, I'm happy to hear that.