Every few years, people pronounce email to be dead. Yet, here we are, some 30 years into email’s existence and it’s still the first place people turn to move their opportunities forward.

Frequently I find myself thinking about email, perhaps the unsexiest of all our daily technologies, questioning how it’s continued to stay relevant for so long. I don’t think there is any single answer that will suffice. Rather, it’s made up of many components:

• Lots of optionalities – no single governing org can get in the way of sender and recipient
• Behaviorally, we’re all indoctrinated into these unwritten rules that keep email courteous
• It’s largely remained a simple, straightforward interface
• It carefully innovates and improves

This week marked the 15th birthday of Gmail. Although they were extremely late to the Email party (seven years behind Yahoo!, eight behind Hotmail/Outlook.com, and eleven behind AOL), when Gmail entered the game, they came correct… just as they did with Google Search (which was the 9th search engine).