When’s the last time you listened to a voicemail message? Well if you work for Coca-Cola, you might never have to listen to a voicemail again. The soft drink giant announced it’s eliminating its voicemail system. Bloomberg Businessweek reported that the company would save about $100,000 a year by getting rid of it. How quickly things change, laments Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “It's astonishing how behavioral norms have evolved, because it used to be that if you got voicemail you were upset and you hung up on the person," Schrage says. "Then, a few months later, ... you were upset if a live person actually answered the phone because you’d prefer just to leave a message,” Schrage says. Voicemail has taken a 180-degree turn since the answering machine was first introduced in the early 1980s and touted as a miracle invention — a godsend for the house and a windfall for office productivity. So what happened? Today we have so many ways to commun
