Old technologies never die, they just dont get upgraded Mercurians - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Old technologies never die, they just don’t get upgraded

Mercurians Jonathan Coopersmith Texas A&M University October 2007

Do technologies experience stages of grief?

(1) Shock or Disbelief (2) Denial (3) Bargaining (4) Guilt (5) Anger (6) Depression (7) Acceptance and Hope (from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross On Death and Dying)

Indicators of decline

• Economic trends

Patterns of usage, sales Firms entering or leaving?

Expectations and perceptions

• The future is elsewhere
• Market research, predictions, and hype

Players

• PTTs and telephone companies
• Equipment providers
• Specialized communication carriers
• Wholesalers/retailers
• Users

Telex

Reasons to keep telex

• legality of correspondence
• banking use
• high reliability and omnipresence
• ability to handle low quality circuits
• relative cheapness
• realtime dialogue

Changed environment

International calling telephones 1983 - 370 million 1992 - 575 million US long-distance rates (cents/minute) 1983 69 1992 24

Bad data presentation

Fax on demand: preparing people for the web

Reasons to keep faxing

• confirmed delivery
• no viruses
• ability to handle low quality circuits
• legality of signatures
• security of transmission
• document formatting independent of

software

1991 US email choices

• 55 email networks
• 15 electronic messaging services
• 80 email software supplier

(all fairly incompatible and requiring much effort to learn to use)

PCs (worldwide) 1991 130 million 2004 775 million Websites (worldwide) 1995 19,000 1997 1 million 2000 20 million 2006 100 million

Triumph of email & web

• Search engine
• Compatibility among systems
• Finally as easy as faxing
• File transfer