Yesterday in front of a large audience Facebook chief operating office Sheryl Sandberg said that email is on its way out. Here’s the quote:

“E-mail–I can’t imagine life without it–is probably going away.”

For support, she cited that only 11 percent of teens currently email.

So freaking what?

Who cares what teens do now? Just because they send 1,000 or 10,000 text messages per month while in high school doesn’t mean they’re not going to email at their future offices, when they go to work.

How are companies going to communicate internally? By text message? How are professional negotiations going to take place? Over Facebook wall posts?

For goodness sake!

Interestingly, the San Francisco Chronicle dug into the Pew statistics that Sandberg used in her presentation. Turns out, 11 percent of teens email friends — but 68 percent of teens say they use email at least occasionally. Doh. This post at Tom’s Guide analyzed this as well.

Of course, email going away would be very good for Facebook, and perhaps Sandberg was simply doing her part in support of her company. Which means all this may simply be a marketing effort, and this morning a lot of people are talking about Sheryl Sandberg’s comments.

Ultimately, she was only expressing her opinion.

So in response, here’s mine:

Email isn’t going anywhere.

It isn’t going to be replaced by text messaging.

It isn’t going to be replaced by Twitter.

It isn’t going to be replaced by Facebook wall posts.

And teenagers, of all people, are not going to determine the future of the most useful communications platform since the telephone.