I believe the days of voicemail are over; the technology – like that of the fax machine – has been supplanted in both form and function. As a recipient, listening to voicemail is far less efficient than reading a text-based message; and as a caller, there is almost no case where one could leave a voicemail but could not just as easily send a text-based message[1]. Even for those businesses that have a system which forwards VM to email as an mp3, consider the inefficiency of listening to, pausing, and “rewinding” in order to write down the name and number of a caller.

Further, I believe that those in other industries will make the same calculation soon, and will opt to save money by simply eliminating voicemail as a possible communication channel. There will be early upheavals similar to the elimination of floppy disks (and now/soon, optical drives), but, with experience, the shift will soon enough be seen as natural and obvious. Fax machines should have vanished completely 5-years ago when scan-to-pdf photocopiers became inexpensive enough to make it into small businesses, and now it’s time for voicemail to make its graceful exit. But, it’ll be a bold move on the part of the vanguard.

After I posted the above to a listserv of IT and EdTech professionals at independent schools in the West, the rebuttal was made that email was supposed to have been replaced by Twitter- and Facebook-type networking.

While no company eliminated phones or email in favor of Twitter or Facebook, the move away from voicemail is not unprecedented (Coca-Cola Disconnects Voice Mail at Headquarters). Coke executives had no doubt seen the Harvard Business Review piece from the year before, Time to Hang Up on Voice Mail. As a Gen-X’er, I might bristle at some of the collective tendencies of Millenials, but I couldn’t help but nod in agreement with much of this NPR piece: Please Do Not Leave A Message: Why Millenials hate voice mail.

It was pointed out to me that: “Voice mail is a convenience for the caller and by eliminating it, you’re telling your customers that you care less about them than you do your own bottom line.” More than any other argument that I’ve heard so far, this is the most compelling. It’s an issue of perception. Will the first school to discontinue voicemail be considered arrogant or prescient? Yes. I think the answer is Both, and I can live with that. Additionally, while leaving a voicemail is certainly more convenient for the caller, as was posited by another, for the recipient it is an entirely different proposition.

It was further argued that voicemail fills a certain niche in the communications spectrum: asynchronous audio/ voice messaging.

The horse-drawn carriage fit a niche in the transportation spectrum (as evidenced by the beautiful port-cochère at the Flood Mansion), but school motor pools no longer support them.

Obviously that’s reductio ad absurdum; I’m not arguing that voicemail never served its purpose, but I am arguing that its day will soon be done[2]. As technologists and as the futurists for our schools and communities, I hope we can all see that asynchronous audio messages will not last another 100-years (having really begun with the Ansaphone in 1960)[3].

If you accept that voicemail – asynchronous audio messaging – won’t last 100-years, when do you think it’ll pass out of favor? 50-years? 25? Or within the next 5?

I am hereby going on the record: schools will be discontinuing voicemail before 2020[4].