A multinational IT services company aims to get rid of internal office emails by the year 2013, with its chief executive saying last week: "Emails are an instrument to shirk responsibility."
Atos, which had a 2010 annual revenue of 5.02 billion euro ($6.6 billion) and 74,000 employees in 42 countries, plans to replace emails with wikis and instant messaging systems that can share files and be used for video conferencing*.
The company said it has reduced its emails by 20 per cent since announcing its plan in February, through encouraging its employees to use Office Communicator, a Microsoft Instant Messenging client, and internal company webpages where workers can share and keep track of their ideas.
"The volume of emails we send and receive is unsustainable for business," Atos' chief executive Thierry Breton said in a statement in 2011.
"It is estimated that managers spend between five and 20 hours a week just reading and writing emails," he said, adding, "email is on the way out as the best way to run a company and do business".

A US technology market research company, Radicati Group, said its study showed that, on average, an office worker received about 110 messages daily in 2010. Former Microsoft chief executive Bill Gates received four million emails a day, most of it spam, according to a 2004 report.
But Bart Jellema, a Sydney-based IT entrepreneur working on improving the efficiency of email systems, said while there was a need for drastic action to overcome the challenges of email information-overload, getting rid of them altogether was not the answer.
"The fact that email is still around proves that there is no better solution yet, otherwise people would have naturally shifted to it," he said.
"So banning email forces people to use even less productive tools."