Email is really powerful but people simply aren't good at taking advantage of it and it varies by email client. Doing some IT work at a startup made this pretty clear to me. I found Slack was much more intuitive for people.
Both systems rely on the savviness of the users for the best experience and I just think email is losing the UX war. Given how terrible people seem to be at communicating I think it's a pretty important factor to consider.
I think this could reasonably be addressed, and several startups have. The trouble is that the default email clients (gmail, outlook, etc.) don't really try to make it any better.
I've also generally had the opposite experience, a huge amount of business offices live and breath in email (mostly Outlook, but I'm sure it varies). Startups tend to run fast and lean, but as soon as you have some threshold of people, email is king.
We used outlook and slack. Business primarily operated via outlook as most communication was unsurprisingly external. Most but not all internal was slack.
I'm not hating on email, it has a lot of good properties and still serves a purpose. Every office appears to have some kind anti-slack vigilante. It's really not that bad.
Email is really powerful but people simply aren't good at taking advantage of it and it varies by email client. Doing some IT work at a startup made this pretty clear to me. I found Slack was much more intuitive for people.
Both systems rely on the savviness of the users for the best experience and I just think email is losing the UX war. Given how terrible people seem to be at communicating I think it's a pretty important factor to consider.