E-substitution for mail: models and results; myths and realities
Presentation at Rutgers 04 Cork by Luis Jimenez, Pitney Bowes. Progress report on study on e-substition
Ian Senior comments on presentation:
Jiminez’s paper is outstanding in its breadth and depth of approach to
>forecasting a future for mail.
>
>The main points remain:
>
>1) Each new communication medium that arrives has an impact that both
>increases the total amount of communication and, frequently, reduces for a
>while the volume and value of existing media but does not completely
>eliminate existing media. Thus cinema was supposed to kill off theatre; TV
>was supposed to kill off cinema; videos were supposed to reduce the amount
>of TV watched; transfer of files via the internet is currently predicted to
>kill off CDs etc. So far none of the threatened media has been killed off
>though their shares of the total communications market have changed. If
>the total market is growing, which it is, that helps them to survive.
>
>2) The Internet is already having a big impact on letters as a medium for
>one-to-one information. I write far more individual e-mails per day than I
>ever wrote individual letters per month. However, the impact of the
>Internet on direct mail advertising so far has not prevented the latter’s
>growth, in the UK at least.
>
>3) However, different technologies can kill off earlier technologies
>completely (e.g the fax killed off telex; e-mail is in the process of
>killing off faxes; audio cassettes and CDs have killed off vinyl; CD’s
>have killed off cassettes. The point in all these cases, including mail,
>comes down to the cost and convenience of the transmission per piece and,
>in the case of mail, the sales generated by the transmission. Spam is an
>example, akin to broadcasting radio and televition, in which the cost of
>sending literally millions of spam messages is no more than sending one.
>Hence, the tiniest response rate producing sales justifies spamming. This
>will change dramatically if ISPs were all to introduce charges for each
>e-mail sent.
>
>In conclusion Jiminez’s paper is an outstanding contribution but does not
>alter my view that the volume of mail pieces in the developed world will
>float slowly downwards over the next 5 years. Mail’s content will
>increasingly be direct marketing while one-to-one information bearing mail
>will largely migrate to the Internet. The advent of competition in
>providing mail services should reduce the cost to senders which in turn
>will encourage growth of volume.
P:LibraryRutgers 2004Jimenez Electronic Substitution for Mail.pdf
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