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- Are You Ready for the $10 Postage Stamp?
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If Google Got Into Mail
By Cameron Powell, VP of Strategic Development, Earth Class Mail. A modified version of this article was requested for publication by Postal Technology International.
Note: The views expressed in the following dramatization do not necessarily reflect the views of its author or of Earth Class Mail. The views do, however, reflect what people in an innovative, fast-moving, world-beating company might think and say.
If Google got into mail, mail would never look the same again. Google would digitize mail, move a larger and larger share of mail and mail readers to the Internet, and either take market share from traditional businesses or put them out of business entirely.
Early users of Google may recall reaching the search results pages and scratching their heads. How will these people make any money? you may recall asking. What’s their model? In the early days, Google did not have any paid ads. They displayed only what are now called the natural, or organic, search results.
Now we know. Google provided an extremely useful service that made life better. Only then did it introduce the advertising.
One can imagine Google would begin its assault on the beaches of mail by bringing its generals into one room and asking them the same question its founders asked when they started their search engine:
Sergey: Where is the expensive consultant?
Larry (pointing): He’s in the corner. He’s the one with the marker.
(Expensive Consultant raises his hand, the one with the marker).
Sergey: Tell him to write on the white board, “Strategic Objective.”
Larry (nodding at Expensive Consultant): Make it so. Read more
How the Posts are Uniquely Positioned to Cure the Fundamental Flaws of E-Mail as a Replacement for Physical Mail
By Ron Wiener, CEO & Postmaster General, Earth Class Mail (Note: This article will be appearing in an upcoming issue of Postal Technology International.)
It took posts three centuries to reach their peak worldwide volume of about 440 billion pieces of mail per year. Contrast that with email, which has exploded in popularity in just the past decade to the tune of over 50 billion messages per DAY (net of spam), not counting billions of additional MMS and SMS messages that these days may contain everything from utility bills to airline reservations, in addition to teenage girl chat. The one billion PCs in the world are like tiny post offices able to receive mail from anywhere in the world. Add in the sales of over a billion more portable, ultra-miniature post offices sold each year – cell phones, iPhones, Blackberries, et al. – and it is easy to see why email and text messaging have reached such behemoth levels of usage in such a short time span. Read more
Are You Ready for the $10 Postage Stamp?
By Ron Wiener, CEO & Postmaster General, Earth Class Mail
[Editor’s Note: This special feature article is longer than a blog article would normally be. It is part of the upcoming online publication entitled Earth Class Mail – The White Paper, Volume II. If you’ve never read Volume I, you can download it here.]
Might we see the USPS issue a $10 postage stamp in our lifetime?
It may not be such a ludicrous prospect. Given its scale economics the USPS is the most productive post in the world, processing about 212 billion pieces of mail per annum (48% of the world’s total volume of mail) with less than 800,000 employees. It delivers more mail per-household and per-business than any other nation, and it does so with the lowest ratio of letter carriers to mail volume.
Of course its capital equipment investment is also the greatest in the world, and its overall carbon footprint dwarfs that of any other national postal operator. Last year it spent $6.5 billion on energy, including the fuel to keep 220,000 trucks — the largest vehicle fleet in the world -– rolling from door to door throughout a vast geographical territory from the wilds of Alaska to the dense concrete jungle of Manhattan. Read more
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