Ray and Ross are pointing to other communication technologies such as Groove and Wiki as possible solutions to the e-mail problem.  I disagree.  Vast millions are already familiar with e-mail and nothing but the e-mail will meet their needs.

Their suggestions amount to telling everyone in Asia to switch to bread because rice crops are infected with some harmful virus.  I do not believe fixing e-mail is beyond technological reach.  I also do not think the alternate technologies are problem free, particularly when they are deployed as widely as e-mail.

I think the world will choose to use minor variations of the e-mail technology instead because they just want e-mail to work better, not something else.  Ray point to the uncontrolled nature of e-mail as the fundamental weakness of e-mail.  Good point.  I believe the initially popular variations will be controlled e-mail services.

Since normal e-mail is noisy and unreliable, new businesses will spring up offering trusted e-mail service to corporate e-mail users.  They will form several co-op networks to apply the control necessary for limiting abuse.  Popularity and profitability of such businesses will force ISPs to join the co-op networks.  Eventually, the co-op networks consolidate into a single federation of trusted e-mail service providers spanning the globe.

Note that this trusted e-mail network will co-exist with current spam-choked e-mail infrastructure and none of the e-mail users will have to change their e-mail client.

I think this vision of the near-future is more reasonable than mass exodus to alternate technologies.  Still, I don't blame Ray and Ross for seeing everything as a nail, particularly since they have such nice hammers.