The logic that some “experts” use to further their own cause boggles my mind, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s claim that email is probably going away is nonsense. It makes me wonder why important executives say stuff like this, then back up their claims with dubious statistics.

Of course, in Sandberg’s case it’s easy to at least guess why she’d try to make people believe email is “probably” going away. Facebook is a major powerhouse of the pop culture phenomena of social networking, but her comments are really self-serving. Ok, yeah, it has infiltrated our lives, and yeah, only 11% of teens email daily — a huge generational drop. But how does that really matter? Us older online workers might use email more frequently, but that’s because we have the business need to do so — whether we work online or from home.

Ask yourself: Do you seriously think that when these teens grow up, graduate from college (if their online empires don’t keep them away), and get hired by an employer that they aren’t going to use email more frequently? I’m sorry but I really don’t see anyone texting or tweeting important documents to each other.

Mobile devices might be more integrated into the daily workflow of the average employee, and with Twitter’s new infrastructure changes, someone might try building an email client out of tweets, but email will continue to be used. In fact, I seem to recall that Facebook was working on their own full-service email client. Does Sandberg’s comments mean that’s changed? Regardless, email is not going away. Email clients might mutate, or have new features like video messages, or appear in a hologram in front of you, or be integrated into your favorite social network — but either way, they’re here to stay.

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