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R E S E A R C H
04/05/2000
More E-mail Accounts Than Phones In 2
Years
By Dick Kelsey, New
York
 The number of e-mail accounts worldwide grew
by 83 percent in 1999, a rate that, if it continues,
will lift the count past telephone lines or television
sets within just a few years, a study by Messaging
Online has found.
"What has taken
the telephone industry 125 years to do and what has
taken television 50 years to do, e-mail will have done
in 20 years," Messaging Online editor Eric Arnum told
Newsbytes today.
By the end of the
year, the survey said, 569 million accounts were in use
worldwide, 40 percent of them in the U.S.; two-thirds of
the U.S. workforce was using e-mail; one out of four
families had at least one e-mail account with a
per-household average of four.
"E-mail is the
killer app," said Arnum. "It is absolutely shocking to
me to see how quickly things like delivery of statements
and bills, electronic checks and electronic transfers
are coming into e-mail."
Outside the U.S.,
e-mail is still in its early stages of development,
despite 1999 growth that exceeded 100 percent. Mailboxes
in the rest of the world more than doubled from 117
million at the end of 1998 to 236 million a year later,
as the use of e-mail spreads into both the corporate
market and into households across Europe, Australia, and
lately, into Latin America.
The telephone and
TV will not fade into history, Arnum said, but e-mail
rapidly graduated into the mass media category. "It's
gone from being a tech dweeb's or geek's toy," he said.
"It deserves to be counted alongside TV, radio and
telephone, even the post office."
And the down side
of e-mail?
"Sometimes," Arnum
said, "people type faster than they think, but they
believe that these messages are sort of transient. It's
a substitute for conversation when actually it's a
written communication that can be used forever. People
have to understand that e-mail is forever."
Reported by
Newsbytes.com
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