Why have office phones at all? Becuase I’m not giving every nimrod I do business with my home number. You might be right about hotel phones though.
(And I don’t have a cell phone now, despite having allegedly learned to talk. And it’s not for lack of cash.)
In 90 years? (Not counting old books, of course.) The reason I don’t like an e-book (my daughter has a Kindle) is that they are still a bit too big and inflexible. When we have real e-paper, the kind where the electronics are printed onto the paper and you can fold it up like a newspaper, the last reason to have a real book will be gone. Art books might last a while longer, but why have paper when you can have something the size and shape and weight of a current book (or less) which can give you any book out there.
I suspect there might be print stations which can produce paper books on demands for the few wackos who want them, but they will be few and far between.
You might have an office number, but not an office phone. Half the “work” calls I get now I get on my cell anyway. No one from my real work ever calls, they all come from conference steering committee members who are even older than I am. We can’t judge 2100 from the stuff we geezers like now.
You won’t have an office phone. The notion of a phone tied to a place instead of a person will be hard for people in 2100 to imagine.
You won’t give nimrods your home number, because you won’t have a home number either. You’ll have a personal phone. And that phone will handle multiple data streams. So you’ll give nimrods you do business with your office voice line, just like you give them your office email, and you’ll give the people you actually want to talk to your personal voice line, just like you give them your personal email. And you’ll set your phone to divert all voice messages to your office line straight to voicemail after 5:00, and you’ll check them whenever you feel like, or however you customize it. But the same phone will retrieve data from all sorts of streams—whatever voice lines you set up, whatever email you set up, whatever IM you set up. So just like you can check your work and personal email on the same computer, you can check whatever voice lines you own from the same device.
I’m glad I’ll be dead before anyone asks me to have work calls sent to my personal phone.
(I’m 34.)
ETA: And I’m never going to own a portable phone. So is the office going to provide me one?
I’d rather have one of these=> virtual keyboard If they don’t work well, don’t tell me. I’m dreaming.
Fax machines are now part of our printer/scanner. We send them only if they’re requested, otherwise it’s scan and email. If someone faxes us, admin forwards it to us via email as a TIF.
I’m amazed that I could find a car with a tape player in it.
Maybe. But refusing to get a portable phone will be equivalent to refusing to get a phone, period, because landlines are going to become specialty items. I guess you could get a regular phone, and attach it to the wall with a chain so you don’t accidentally take it with you when you leave home.
If you’re going to have a work station (that is a “computer”) at work, I’m sure the IT guy can set it up so you can send and receive voice on it. But basically voice calls will be device independent, and you’ll be able to send and receive voice on any device you want–just like you can check your work email at home. If knuckleheads call you at 10:00 at night, who cares, because you’ll set your device to “away” status, and the call will go to voicemail without alerting you, just like your phone at work does today.
I meant a for-real keyboard. Sure, they have portable devices that work like keyboards, but you can’t really for-real type on them. If you’re just doing light work, a touchscreen works almost as well, if you really need to type then you need a real keyboard.
My brother told his workplace that if they wanted him to have a cell, they’d have to provide it… they did.
Some companies do already. And they will, with grumbling, when they tear out the landlines, and save a lot of money.
Lemur866 is quite right about phone numbers. Phone numbers are an artifact of when each physical telephone was connected physically to an input at the central office switch. Things started to get fuzzy when you were able to redirect calls from phone X to phone Y. Now, with number portability, numbers are connected to a person, not a chunk of hardware. I’ve had 3 or 4 mobiles with my number, and my kids have had a lot more. Plus, mobile phone users have stopped even thinking in terms of numbers. When I call someone, it is usually from my call log. I haven’t memorized the mobile numbers of my kids or even my wife.
You remind me of the detectives in two series I’m reading, starting in the mid-90s, one in England and one in Venice. The detectives, both senior and thus older guys, are very suspicious of this new PC thing, though they begin to appreciate the benefits gotten from people who know how to use them. They both slowly grew into cellphones also.
My problem with the real keyboard and the touchscreen on my Droid is that they are too small. The one I linked to is full size. It might not have the tactile feedback a real keyboard has yet. OTOH, my kid types really fast on her tiny cellphone keyboard, so maybe I’m too old to adapt.
Despite a website and Google Adwords and other web advertising, the vast majority of my new customers come from the traditional yellowpages. More than justifies the $200 a month I pay for my ads.
Now that is cool. But I wonder how it feels. And you can’t put it on your lap. Or maybe you can (typing a “b” feels really, really good.)
I admit being confused about what part of this means you don’t have a phone number. Artifact or not, you will always have a phone number, even if your telephone does you the courtesy of remembering it for you. The numbers being portable doesn’t make the fact you have a number fuzzy at all - it emphasizes the fact you have a number, and the number is the thing. Doesn’t it?
I’ve had a cell phone. I know people with cell phones. I gave back a cell phone to a friend of mine who accidentally left it at my apartment last weekend, and thus was totally without phone for two days.
Congratualations if you love your cell phone, but it is not ignorance that makes me dislike the things. Quite the opposite, actually.
I’m an old telephone person, and the phone number implements a switching hierarchy - first area code, then three digits for the local office, then the number for your phone inside the territory of the local office. But that has already been broken - my daughter has a cellphone with a Chicago area code, but now lives in NJ with the same number. The number is now a pointer to your phone, which can be dynamic. There is no real reason for a 10 digit number anymore. IP addresses are not really human readable, and there is no reason for a phone number to be either. VoIP doesn’t go through the normal switching channels for instance a computer to computer call made with Skype. There is no reason that instead of a phone number each person will get something like an email address, and a path to that address can be looked up when someone calls it. When I started at Bell Labs if I wanted to send an email to someone, I had to specify an explicit path from my computer to their computer, which is kind of like a phone number today. No reason phone numbers can’t make the same transition. That won’t do away with land lines. I think when phone numbers go away almost no one will notice.
And you might have a begbert@work “number” as well as a begbert@home number. Even better, you might have a junk mail number the way lots of people have junk mail email accounts today. Calls there go immediately to voice mail, where you can see the text using voice to text, and so can delete it much faster then you can now.
But the “number” isn’t tied to a particular device, and a particular device isn’t tied to a number. Neither is a person tied to one and only one phone number.
You can surely have a “work” phone number, and never answer that work number when you’re not at work, and never have the work number give an alert when a voice message is coming through unless you’re at work. That’s pretty trivial, even today. It doesn’t matter much if the reason you aren’t answering your work phone is that your work phone is chained to your desk at work, or if it just doesn’t ring when you’re away from your desk.
And in the future it won’t matter much if you lose your “phone”, because you’ll be able to get your voice data on any device. So you lose your phone at your buddy’s house, well, when you get home you just grab a device, enter your userid (your “phone number”) and authenticate it (your password), and the device you just logged into is now your phone.
To respond to you and Voyager, that doesn’t make it any less a telephone number. And frankly neither does putting alphabet letters in it.
How is the phone going to know when I’m at work, pray tell? I have to remember to tend to it’s precious little settings every time I enter or leave the office? I think not - when the office issues me the cell phone, I will chain it to the desk. (Specifically, chained by the power cord I’ll never unplug from it since I don’t want the stupid thing dying on me.)
Not that I think this sort of transition will happen in my working lifetime - I don’t get the impression that landlines are that expensive for businesses.
You keep a large number of spare phones lying about the house, do you? Or are we positing functionally free universal fabricators capable of coughing out complicated electronics now? I’m not at all sure we’ll have those in 90 years.
eh, whatever, ignore this post
At work we use thin clients, and this is exactly the situation we have. I’m typing on a keyboard tied to it now. If it suddenly started to smoke, I can unplug it, toss it in the recycling, walk down to an empty office, get a new one, and resume typing in the middle of a sentence. Actually, I can stop typing, fly to Japan, insert my smart card into a thin client there, and resume typing in the same way. It is quite awesome.
You’re right. But your email address is basically a number also. If I say into my Droid’s voice dialing “Call Home” it translates my voice into the right number. If I email my wife’s email address, it translates her domain to the IP address of a mail server for her account, which then maps her name into more or less a user account number. This is all totally hidden nowadays.
That’s why call forwarding, which used to be a feature of all PBXs (and no doubt still is) never took off. It was too much of a pain to remember to turn it on and turn it off. Now, if you log into a work account, it might turn it on for you but for the most part the number will go with whatever phone is now associated with you.
The handsets are, since they are usually tied to a specific PBX, so there is no competition once a company has bought the switch. And landlines are expensive, which is why a lot of companies are moving to VoIP.
When the update cycle is a lot shorter than the wearout cycle for phones, you will begin to accumulate spares. My old cell works fine still. If it were the type with a cim card, I could swap my number to it if my current phone died. My daughter is more expert at this than me, since she breaks her phones and so knows how to switch them.