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You’re actually making it HARDER to have a conversation Back before we met, I had two primary modes of digitally communicating with people: Real TimeSome of the digital platforms I used were inherently “real time” (phone, Skype, IRC, Google Hangouts, etc.), where there was a built-in expectation of an immediate, rapid-fire conversation wherein everyone involved was more or less fully-present and participating. AsynchronousConversely, there were other platforms that were inherently asynchronous(email, voicemail, iMessage, Twitter DMs, etc.), where there was no expectation of an immediate response, and people tended to send cogent feedback in their own time. Then you came along, and rocked everyone’s world by introducing a conversational melting pot that is neither fully real time, nor fully asynchronous. You’re somewhere in between: You’re asynchronish. 

Or look at the fact that you can call a Lyft car from Slack, or an Uber from Atlassian's HipChat, without ever leaving a chat window. The idea is pretty straightforward: People like to chat and don't like leaving chat to open another app. Put the app in the chat, and you get the best of all possible worlds. It's a proven concept in Japan. There, the mega-popular messaging app Line is so successful that it was able to introduce mobile payments and taxi services of its own right next to the main chat functions.

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Office is also maintaining its dominance even as companies add Google Apps to their offerings, letting employees choose between Microsoft or Google options. It turns out that employees stick with Office apps for many projects they’re getting done on their own, but when collaborating they switch to Google products.

Yesterday, email-killing team-collaboration upstart Slack nabbed another $200 million in funding, valuing the company at $3.8 billion. But perhaps more importantly, Slack now claims 2.7 million daily active users, up from 2.3 million just last month, with big-brand customers including CenturyLink, CBS, Dow Jones, Harvard University, Samsung, the U.S. State Department, and the Federal Aviation Administration.

Fast-forward six years and you could now say that SMS is also on the way out, replaced by a plethora of Internet-based messaging services. But Sandberg had a point — looking at the methods of communication that permeate the lives of young people gives the biggest clue as to where we’re heading. But it will be a gradual process guided by the demographics of people who use a given service; Uber may be phasing out email completely, but that’s because the majority of its users — in the U.S. at least — are under the age of 35 according to recent reports. But an airline such as KLM will have customers spanning all age groups, so it would be less likely to switch off telephone or email support quite so quickly.

The Domo platform takes data from almost any other imaginable business app, from Salesforce to Instagram, and pushes it into one place with real-time updates. If a sales rep wants to see how many likes a post got on Facebook from a certain territory in Nebraska, Domo boasts that it's the place. 

Workforce communications — relying on a more top-down messaging approach for the mobile workforce — is enjoying a great surge in adoption, but is principally oriented toward the ‘hardwork’ done by workers in retail, manufacturing, transport, security, and construction, and away from the ‘softwork’ done by office workers. This class of tool is all about mobile messaging. (Note: we are planning a market narrative about this hot area.)

Enterprise collaboration is a dubious pursuit. You can almost sense its impending failure the minute it gets introduced to a workforce and becomes just another tool that employees are supposed to use.It doesn’t help when CIOs downplay the value of collaboration tools by simply procuring something that meets the lowest common denominator and enables them to check another item off their to-do list. More like this 6 IT leaders share tips to drive collaboration How Mobile, Social Tech Elevate Enterprise Collaboration CIOs Need to Snap Out of Complacency on IDG Answers How to retrieve data lost from Outlook address book after creating a shortcut? State of the CIO 2015 More than 500 top IT leaders responded to our online survey to help us gauge the state of the Read Now “There’s a lot of failures in enterprise collaboration, loosely termed, because people don’t really know what they’re aiming for so obviously they don’t hit it,” says Joel Confino, CEO and founder of the enterprise Q&A platform Haydle.

For its part, Asana has been testing a beta of a product called Track Anything, which sounds like a dashboard-style product that will let people automatically signal to colleagues jobs for completing tasks without them having to do the legwork. In a working world where we are forever multitasking and may be more intent on getting things done rather than ticking and updating progress reports to let people know that we have, adding in automation seems to be an essential development. This is a challenge that others are tackling, too. BetterWorks is building integrations with whatever software use most, which in turn communicates our progress on a task in the background.

Another reference point is this article by The Economist, where a study showed that a factory was able to save the equivalent of eliminating 200 jobs just by limiting meetings to a maximum of 30 minutes and 7 people per meeting.