Microsoft 365 went down today, and the entire corporate world froze. Millions lost Outlook, and even Copilot went blind without Exchange data.
We love talking about the AI revolution, yet a 50-year-old protocol still holds the global economy hostage.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: AI is not going to kill email. Big Tech actually needs email to stay broken.
- Walled gardens win when open standards lose. Slack, Teams, and WhatsApp trap your data. Email is the last open network left, which is why tech giants try to bury it under bloated apps instead of fixing it.
- Your inbox is a digital prison. Every bank alert, legal receipt, and password reset is locked to an email address. Moving off it means rebuilding the identity layer of the entire internet.
- AI is just a band-aid on bad plumbing. Today proved our fancy AI agents are completely helpless when the underlying Exchange server hiccups. We are building Ferraris on top of dirt roads.
We are not stuck with email because it is great. We are stuck because nobody profits from building a free, open replacement that nobody owns.
So until someone breaks that monopoly, get used to hitting refresh.
