September 20, 2005
VON: Disaster relief appeal
This is a special VON appeal on behalf of all victims of the PSTN communications disaster.
Have you ever missed a call because someone rang you on the wrong number? Found it hard to keep track of people’s phone numbers? Keep forgetting to call on family birthdays? Disappeared into a vortex of voicemail tag? Been called back twice by someone who dialled the wrong number and just wanted to make sure they entered it in right?
(cue soft music)
So today we are launching a special appeal on behalf of all frustrated telecommunications users. Users that live in the real world, with real everyday communications problems…
The real world
We have travelled afar to scour a strange place where new treatments for the affliction of frustratia telefonica are being developed. A clinical, strange world. Almost, indeed, a fantasy world…
Fantasy world
So I’d like you to join me in supporting this special appeal on behalf of all communications users. Let us together join the search for the missing features. Let us solve the problems that ordinary people find in their daily lives when trying to keep in touch.
(cue cresendo, violins, sotto voce, view of presenter)
Just always, always, remember the suffering users.
(cue Skype logo, flash up Paypal account details to which to send donations.)
OK, that was a bit of fun. You might think my criticism of the PSTN somewhat harsh, but from the user’s perspective I doubt it achieves “one nine” reliability, forget 99.999%. Consider how many impulses to communicate are successfully acted upon and executed fully first time. I’m going to be wondering the halls and talks at VON with one question in my mind for vendors: how does your stuff improve the lot of users? The point of this stupid network was better and new communications tools. Is the industry rising to the challenge?
PS — After I drafted this wee critique on the introspective nature of the industry, the WiFi in the halls failed and Niklas Zennstrom’s talk was a technological tour de failure. So I was tempted to re-cast the “disaster relief appeal” a bit more spitefully, but I’ll be nice for once.
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I am jealous of you being there. All those people in my Skype buddies list with "Boston" and I am stuck here playing with a softswitch :( - one day I will make it to a VON.
Maybe I have been eating the wrong stuff for lunch but when I read the sentence "Consider how many impulses to communicate are successfully acted upon and executed fully first time." two things popped into my head without effort of thought.
The first is that is this not normal? By normal look at nature and see if insects, fish have the five nines you speak about (presuming your five nines="successful" communications). I would guess they do not and if in nature it does not exist, forget man creating it. As a follow up secondary thought, you may solve problems with phone tag Etc. but by the time you solve it we will have new problems with some other blend of communications. Fix one bug and a new one pops up so you will always be behind.
And should we be trying to faciliate every impulse to communicate? People are being bombarded with comms, from emails, to calls, to IMs. A lot of reasearch is concluding that it is lowering productivity rather than increasing it. So the odd person whose voice mail we do not return Etc. maybe a good thing.
I think the real questions you should be asking surround "community". The future of comms lies in building tools/services that let people build cyber-social-networks quickly and easily, are empowered by knowledge of your "real-life" social network and so on. For me one-to-one comms are of less interest as I see the real future dev. over the next 5-10 years being one-to-many and many-to-many communications in which telephony is blended in as required.
Posted by: at September 21, 2005 01:54 PMRichard Stastny has a better camera than you! Either that or you're getting substantially more alcohol than him over there!
Posted by: at September 22, 2005 02:24 AMI look forward to you sending me a nice new phone to replace my clearly obsolete model!
Posted by: at September 24, 2005 11:27 PM