[GreenKeys] Western Union vs. Telephone 1877

[Jim Haynes]

That W.U. memo is apocryphal.  I don't think an authentic version of it 
has ever been found.

But if you consider W.U.s business model the telephone really was useless
to them.  Their model is you bring them your telegram, they transmit it
a long way by Morse code and deliver it to the recipient.  If they 
considered a telephone only as a way to transmit a message with that model
it was useless since the range was so limited compared to telegraphy.
And that model didn't envision the sender and recipient actually carrying
on a conversation with each other.  They could consider the telephone as
only a toy, and in 1877 that's almost all it was.  The telephone was also
useless for another kind of business they had, a one sender to many 
receivers service such as stock quotations and press.

I certainly can't claim any expertise in market forecasting.  When cell
phones first came out I thought usage would be limited to a few kinds
of people: contractors, real estate agents, maybe doctors and traveling
sales people, and probably to the idle rich just as an impressive and
expensive toy.  But then one day I saw a woman talking on a cell phone
from a K-Mart store and realized how wrong I had been.