You have so many assumptions in this response that I'm quite sure you don't know what you're saying. My organization is not a little tech startup with everyone sitting in a room. We have editors, translators, acquisitions, materials, marketing folks, etc. We have part time, full time, contractors, volunteers. We have people in over 20 countries, some working from home, some from offices, some from coffee shops. Most of them use Macs, some of them PCs, at least one person runs Linux.

Email is the universal medium. If I need to search for some history, I start with email since it is the most common. Skype we use for private and urgent chat. Campfire we use for general development chat. Basecamp we use for archivable product decision making. All of those have their uses.

I can't begin to think why you believe all my short emails are better suited for chat, but without context it's extremely, extremely ignorant and wrong.