Email is “dead”, and that’s what Slack proclaims. There are numerous articles where Slack is a big fail. They end up listing any organisation that “signs” up for them. (It is a personal opinion and I haven’t seen anyone expressly mentioning a Slack link. However, everyone lists their email addresses).
Where do you expect Fastmail to go over the next 20 years?
Some have claimed “email is dead” over the years, but that’s not what we see. New communication systems come along, but they tend to augment the existing ones in different ways. Email is still the largest open federated communication protocol on the internet. Any new protocol tends to be vendor-specific and tries to lock people into their system.In that way, email continues to have a unique place that I think will keep it around for a long time. I believe that means Fastmail still has a bright future going forward.Getting email, contacts, and calendaring right in a business setting with all the sharing and different interaction scenarios is a difficult problem. This is why there’s really only a couple of companies that truly have large business ready email, contact, and calendar systems. I feel Fastmail’s involvement in standards work has allowed us to learn all the complexities of these interactions, and it’s something we’ll be focusing more on over the next decade.
I have been a Fastmail customer for over 7 years now (barring one time when I flirted with the Exchange accounts). Owning up my domain helped me to negotiate and transfer all my email. However, I haven’t looked back since. Exchange mutated to an ugly version of Office 365 (with a horrible UI to boot).
Kudos Fastmail! I remember the time when the owner used to provide support himself. Things have definitely changed in the interim. They didn’t mention that they had sold off their service to Opera but then repurchased it from them. Opera browser wanted to provide free email services to its community members and evidently made a fine mess of the service. I don’t know what transpired behind the scenes, but it was an excellent decision to go solo. It was then when Fastmail transitioned to a formal organisational structure.
via On your side for 20 years: An interview with Rob Mueller, a Fastmail founder
RadOncNotes 