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Who knew? I am blogging from a collaborative technology conference in Boston and the first three speakers all basically said that email and word processing are hopelessly old fashioned. John Seeley Brown commented, “Well I guess some people still use email.” Matt Glotzbach from Google said “I never use a word processing program anymore.”

So what’s replacing them among the technologically savvy? Instant messaging and wikis. According to Mike Rhodin from IBM, 70 percent of Internet users use instant messaging and four in ten send as many IMs as they do emails. Rhodin says that emails are fine for sending people information, but aren’t much help when people need a quick answer to keep moving forward with whatever they’re working on. Email does not enable real-time business. Email, apparently, is the new snail mail.

Wikis also help staff ramp up productivity and efficiency. Glotzbach said that most marketing copy, presentations, and most other things at Google are written using wikis, because wiki technology allows everyone to work on the same project together—no more sending around a single document with track changes on and no more cutting and pasting a bunch of little documents into one big document. Another benefit is that everyone gets to see what everyone else is doing in the document (instead of just one point person), creating more opportunities to create synergies, find redundancies and mistakes, and reduce duplication of effort. Imagine building a board book or a business plan or an annual meeting program this way.