I'm old enough that I've lived through these stages:<p>1) There were no answering machines and no cordless phones, much less mobile. If you called someone at home, and they didn't answer, you just tried later. If you called someone at a business, everyone had a secretary who could pick up if they didn't answer. She (and it was always "she") would write your message on a message slip (they were generally pink) and put it on the person's desk. Or, for smaller businesses, you called the main number, and the operator would connect you, and take a message if no answer.<p>2) Home answering machines happened. They used cassette tapes, and you could rewind and replay your messages. The outgoing greeting was on a second tape. When you got home, or if you were screening your calls, you'd see a blinking light indicating "new message", then hit buttons to rewind and play your messages. When the tape got full you could put in a new tape or write over the old messages. For businesses, phone systems became smarter and could take voicemail, but this was expensive, many businesses still used the old people-intensive way for messages, and many businesses preferred this because customers liked talking to a real person to leave a message.<p>3) Mobile phones with SMS became available to consumers. (We are into the 90s now). I don't recall this being especially popular at first, most people still left voicemails, even on mobile phones. But SMS became more and more used over the next decade plus (before smartphones when they exploded in popularity).<p>4) Fast forward to today. People born after 1980 or so, I find, really don't do voicemail at all, text messaging is the thing. If you leave them a voicemail, it doesn't get listened to. The best you can expect is a callback or a text message because they saw you called, but the usual response is nothing. For businesses, some form of instant messaging (IM) is prevalent inside the company. The IM might say "Hey do you have a minute to talk OTP?" but no one just calls someone else cold, much less leaves a voicemail and expects a response.<p>IMO stage (1) actually worked fine, and now that we are at stage (4) that works fine too (as long as you don't pretend voicemail is a thing and use other means of communication). The intermediate stages were awkward at best.<p>I think Coca-Cola's action makes a ton of sense for any company. Maybe it was fear of legal discovery that prompted it, maybe it was what they said (streamlining operations), but it is a good thing, IMO.