Perhaps you didn't really need them. The team I worked in used them a lot but that is because we had two week intense brainstorming workshops several times a year. We would sometimes have half a dozen of us drawing and writing on a huge whiteboard at the same time, all the while arguing about what was the best way to solve this particular problem. This was in a combined electrical engineer/software developer/physicist team.

Without the whiteboard we would have been sketching on paper and would have been buried in waste paper within the hour.