The world has a short memory it seems, especially when it comes to disruptive innovation that dies before its time. Remember Outbox ? Many won't, but it was a startup that launched in February 2013 with a mission to give people the choice to receive their snail mail via email. The premise was very simple: Outbox would collect your real-world mail three times a week, digitise the content, then make it accessible on online for access at your convenience. It was a success, especially in the light that the USPS was grossly inefficient. And people loved it.
“Amazing service – can’t live without it. Read, sort, forward and unsubscribe from your physical mail, all online.” – Naval Ravikant, founder/CEO of Angellist
But it was shortlived.
By February the following year, Outbox shut down. Following meetings with Evan Baehr and Will Davis, the founders of Outbox, the Postmaster General seemingly did not welcome the direct and disruptive competition with the mail service.
Two years after the launch of Outbox allowing consumers to have digital access to their mail, the Post Office still has not announced any plans to allow consumers to have access to a digital version of their mail. In February 2014, the same month that Outbox shut down, the Post Office incurred a net loss of $354 million, following a fiscal year 2013 loss of $5 billion. - InsideSource
But now, the Postal Service has launched something called "Informed Delivery", a service which is exactly the same as Outbox, whereby, according to the website you can "get up to 10 mail piece images in your morning email, which can be viewed on any computer or a smart phone. Get more mail than that? Additional images are available for viewing on your online dashboard - in the same place you track your packages! Don't worry if you are on travel; if you have email or online access, you can see much of the mail that will be delivered to your mailbox."
Much of the same arguments that the Postmaster General used against Outbox in terms of security and data privacy now exist with Informed Delivery, and were openly given in a statement by Tony DeLancy, Senior Manager, Public Relations at USPS at the time of forcing Outbox to close.
In the end, postal management was concerned that Outbox’s approach might compromise both the security and value of the mail. Ultimately, management concluded that Outbox’s business model was flawed – a conclusion that the market appears to have affirmed.
At this point in time other countries from Sweden to Namibia have more digital-forward mail services than the U.S. and are clearly open to the competition, but here the USPS wants to control the only service that exists for US citizens.
The tech world has a short memory it seems, but for the Postal Service those arguments used to close down Outbox will come back to haunt them in light of all the privacy and data protection breaches in recent months, as well as the ongoing Snowden revelations.
And would you really want to trust a government organisation with scanning your physical mail and storing it online for other eyes to see ?
