Is it possible?  Not likely in the workplace anytime soon.  What has been surprising is that we have seen some companies actually ask this question internally.

"If email is such a hassle, so inefficient, creates so much headache, and is such a source of litigation exposure, why don’t we turn it off?"

After a few moments of nervous laughter around the table, there is a disturbing clarity that sets in – you can’t turn it off.

One of our customers actually conducted the analysis to understand if placing a phone call or sending an email is cheaper.  They have 100k+ employees and have a significant private voice network that drives the cost of calls way down.  That said, email still came in as the "cheaper" alternative.  I’ve not seen the calculations, but it provided them the clarity they needed to embrace email as a core communication platform.

It forms the foundation of all core business processes including how you share information, interact with customers, and generally run your day-to-day business operations.  It is the de facto workflow/file manager/document management system as all of these technologies are at least one if not a dozen steps behind it.   Sharepoint may indeed be the dark horse out there and I can see a path to getting to that type of collaboration, but the majority of workers are deeply rooted in their email lives.  Cliff Reeves has a great post on Sharepoint here.

So, if you can’t live without it, how do you live with it?