[GreenKeys] Western Union vs. Telephone 1877

[Steve Hilsz]

Point taken. Sort of like the first Xerox machines. When businesses were 
introduced to them, their response was "We have carbon paper."

However, the legends says that the Bell interests offered President Orton 
the telephone patent for $100,000 and he dismissed it as a "toy."

Sent: Monday, June 11, 2018 17:44
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.
> 


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