Secret New Enterprise Blackberry
Here's the problem with those people at TechCrunch, Engadget, etc.
They are successful which makes them soft. They now have cushy day jobs. No more digging through virtual trashcans trying to outdo the next blog. Naaah. Now they just phone the stories in.
Some of us, still look for the glory. Some of us have to travel all the way to Newfoundland to find the secret testing site of the new enterprise Blackberry device by RIM.
On a slightly more serious note, don't you want to talk to the person who thought this up? Remember in 1995 when AT&T deployed those phones with keyboards and for a brief (3 months) you could dial into CompuServe (or the Unix email system I was on at MSFT).
The people who thought this up probably had the business objective right, probably even had a business case that would make sense to you and I (assuming it was for a mobile device).
I asked the desk clerks on various nights if they had ever seen anyone use that keyboard. All didn't even realize the keyboard was there and most said people used cell phones anyway.
Time flies, eh?
They are successful which makes them soft. They now have cushy day jobs. No more digging through virtual trashcans trying to outdo the next blog. Naaah. Now they just phone the stories in.
Some of us, still look for the glory. Some of us have to travel all the way to Newfoundland to find the secret testing site of the new enterprise Blackberry device by RIM.
On a slightly more serious note, don't you want to talk to the person who thought this up? Remember in 1995 when AT&T deployed those phones with keyboards and for a brief (3 months) you could dial into CompuServe (or the Unix email system I was on at MSFT).
The people who thought this up probably had the business objective right, probably even had a business case that would make sense to you and I (assuming it was for a mobile device).
I asked the desk clerks on various nights if they had ever seen anyone use that keyboard. All didn't even realize the keyboard was there and most said people used cell phones anyway.
Time flies, eh?
My friends 14 year old daughter didn't know what a "phone booth" was. I told her it was people can use a pay phone. [Blank stare] "Why don't they just use their cell phone?" She asks.
Too funny.
Posted by: Keith Glover | June 21, 2008 at 23:39
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Payphone_loading_Microsoft_Windows_XP.jpg/450px-Payphone_loading_Microsoft_Windows_XP.jpg
BT's pay phones, the newer ones are also WiFi hot spots
Posted by: stewart | June 22, 2008 at 08:08
You need to send that to 2600 magazine...
Posted by: Ron | June 22, 2008 at 21:47
Keith: I expect your 14 year old self would have trouble identifying a mangle (unless he'd seen one in an old film), and when told it was for drying clothes would ask "Why don't people just use a tumble dryer?"
Knowledge of obsolete technology is only useful to historians.
Posted by: Sam B | June 23, 2008 at 04:24
Lol, Sam. I'm 35 and I still didn't recognize what a mangle was until I looked it up. :) I always thought that it was called a wringer. I see your point, funny thing tho...my parents still used one instead of the spin cycle when I was a kid.
"Knowledge of obsolete technology" is one of the MOST important bits of information we get. How else will you learn anything? You can't really be saying that learning about ARPANET, MILNET, NSFNet etc. is not useful to anyone besides a historian. The fact is that the people who are the first to recognize when some technology is obsolete, are the first to spot the new trends and capitalize on them.
Posted by: Keith Glover | June 23, 2008 at 13:14