Dilbert
http://www.telecom-economics.com/images/dilbert/dilbert_videophone1.gif
There’s also the fact that video-mobile phones remove the ‘mobile’ part of the equation. You can talk and drive or talk and walk to the bank/store/next appointment while needing to look at a screen (or at least you shouldn’t). So the very concept of ‘mobile video’ takes away a big part of the usefulness of a mobile phone.
Toss in what is really gained by adding video to a phone. There’s not a lot of information conveyed in a video communication that isn’t already conveyed in audio. So the pressure to adapt for the average person is minimal.
This is extremely persuasive until you think about it for five minutes. The exact same problem faced the original telephone, and the automobile, and the television, and the radio, and anything else that requires a network to function in a meaningful manner. All of those inventions took off, so that problem cannot be very important.
Well, the thing was, there wasn’t really an alternative to the original telephone (“I say, Smithers, pop down to the Post Office and send this telegram to our office in Weasel-Upon-Stoat, and tell them we need an answer in the next 15 minutes!”)
The car thing is interesting, but ultimately anything beats the hell out of walking, and it’s always nice to have something with which to impress the neighbours with- the best example of this is that Far Side cartoon in which a man is looking out of his lounge window at the ICBM missile parked in his neighbour’s driveway, saying “Wouldn’t you know it… now the Hendersons have got the Bomb!”
In short, the car filled a nice that didn’t exist and was potentially useful. And horses don’t count, because there’s a limit to how far a horse can go, and unlike a car, they get tired.
The Radio had military applications, and again, it was totally new at the time (unless you lived next door to a Concert Hall, of course), and as long as there was someone broadcasting something (The BBC, for example), you could pick it up. Same thing for telly, which was really a natural evolution of radio, IMO.
Well, actually, she’d wonder why Cadet 1 just didn’t turn his phone off. Heinlein imagined the handheld wireless phone, but couldn’t imagine them having an on-off switch. I suppose that’s because phones at the time didn’t have them. And you couldn’t unplug them from the wall either. The only way to avoid getting a call was to leave the receiver off the hook. (Young people will have a hard time believing these facts, but they probably also won’t believe that the only color phones came in in those days was black.)
Like Jonathan Chance, this was also the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread.
Martini Enfield: You do make some good points about the exceptions all of those technologies had going for them, but you have to realize that society was perfectly capable of functioning without every single one of them.
Prior to cars, we didn’t need to commute dozens or hundreds of miles on a daily basis: We lived close to our jobs and walked or used slower forms of transporation. Prior to telephones, mail was a lot more important and things progressed at the speed of mail. (Of course, mail could go a lot faster then in the big cities. In London, there were like two or three mail pickups a day, and same-day response to a letter sent in the morning was expected.) You get the idea. No invention becomes essential until after it’s been adopted and had a chance to change things.
Here is a PDF document that is about how new technologies get accepted in the marketplace. There are a lot of pioneers who got scalped.
Derleth: I believe you’re missing his initial point; he’s saying there’s no incentive to buy video-phones because nobody else has a video phone and, thus, the added-value of the product - the video screen - is useless because nobody has a screen to receive your video or a camera to transmit it.
This is what makes it markedly different from the examples which you are citing:
“The exact same problem faced the original telephone, and the automobile, and the television, and the radio, and anything else that requires a network to function in a meaningful manner. All of those inventions took off, so that problem cannot be very important.”
The networks required by television and radio are quite different than those required by telephones; yes, there must have been a point when broadcasters started prior to any significant market penetration; I would think that the initial broadcasts were largely displayed in stores trying to sell radios.
I don’t even see what automobiles would have to do with anything, to be honest.
Telephones would be comprable, that’s true, but there is still a clear distinction. Telephones were not attempting to replace a pre-existing product, they were creating a fundamentally new service. [I do think there would be some overlap, in that early objectors to the telephone feared intrusion on privacy, just as some objectors to video phones would.] Thus, it would take time for market penetration, yes, but people would be more likely to be interested in the convenience; the only new aspect to a video phone is the “video” aspect, and that is only functional once penetration has been acheived. Thus, there is little or not value specific to the video phone.
Sorry, I’m new here, I didn’t know you couldn’t edit posts … I meant to add, "The function is different, in that there is one transmitter broadcasting to all the receivers (or, rather, one transmitter per channel), whereas the phones (video phones, at least, though I believe early telephones were different) require active participation from both/all parties.
This never ceases to amaze me. Thanks for bringing it up.
(complimentary link)
ThatGuamGuy: Welcome to the boards.
You do make some good points, and it looks like I did miss that point. Less objections faced the telephone, the television, and the radio, but objections did exist, simply because nobody lived in a world that required such devices. We know from history that that objection wasn’t very strong past a certain point. (Of course, that certain point came decades after each was invented. TV was working in the 1920s and even being broadcast from experimental stations to the point that the few people with sets could watch regularly scheduled programming.)
The big network the automobile requires is gasoline distribution and, to a lesser extent, parts stores and mechanics skilled in automobile repair. It is possible to own a car and completely maintain it yourself and order in everything special, but it isn’t the kind of thing you can build an industry around. Compare it to the home computer industry when all home computers were (usually) shipped in kits and required significant investments in knowledge just to use at a basic level.