[GreenKeys] Western Union vs. Telephone 1877

[Jack]

When I was in AT&T's pre-breakup cellular company, Advanced Mobile Phone
Service (AMPS), in the 1980 timeframe,
they were having all kinds of discussions about what to do with cellular
when Ma Bell
broke up. Someone decided to give it up because there would only be several
hundred thousand
mobile phone users by 1990. Of course, they would not even acknowledge that
a "portable phone" might be marketable since they didn't want to erode their
wired
telephone base.  In the mid-1990's, AT&T paid $11 billion to buy back into
the
cell phone business by purchasing the cellular systems owned by McCaw
Cellular; many of them were "Cellular One" franchises (I known, I was
there).

Jack K2TTY


-----Original Message-----
From: greenkeys-bounces at mailman.qth.net <greenkeys-bounces at mailman.qth.net>
On Behalf Of Jim Haynes
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2018 8:44 PM
To: Steve Hilsz <jydsk at tds.net>
Cc: Greenkeys <greenkeys at mailman.qth.net>
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] Western Union vs. Telephone 1877

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.

______________________________________________________________
GreenKeys mailing list
Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/greenkeys
Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm
Post: mailto:GreenKeys at mailman.qth.net

2002-to-present greenkeys archive:
http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/greenkeys/
1998-to-2001 greenkeys archive:
http://mailman.qth.net/archive/greenkeys/greenkeys.html
Randy Guttery's 2001-to-2009 GreenKeys Search Tool:
http://comcents.com/tty/greenkeyssearch.html

This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html