The Personal Via Dolorosa of Technology Adoption

It’s always the same, this via dolorosa of technology adoption. The long arduous wait for the idea to take hold, what seems obvious to become commonly accepted, and always the journey: never ending and the weight of our wants unbearable. With every new step we delude ourselves and assume the end is nigh but the path is long, rarely a sound of success, mostly modulations of optimism and pessimism.

It takes fifteen years for a research idea to get to the main stream, a department head at Bell labs once remarked. I hope he is wrong, at least this one time. Elisha Grey, who had been working on the telephone contemporaneously with Bell, gave up on the idea, unconvinced about the public adoption of the technology. He was surer of the prospects of the business telegraph, a hope now consigned to the recrements of history. And it was left to Strowger, trying to save his dying mortician’s business (always the puns keep coming!), to invent what is essentially the quintessential user interface of telephony, the telephone number dialing system. It took a long time for the investments to go in for the infrastructure to support Strowger switches.

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that the initial team at Google benefited from advice from an anonymous source, to keep the search engine user interface as simple as possible, to less than a dozen or so words on the first page. Strowger’s invention, on the other hand, replaced a simpler user interface (voice commands to a human operator) with a more complex interface (remembering and dialing sequences of numbers). No, it wasn’t ease of use that “made” this invention of Strowger; it was the fact that consumers could reach anybody in the world when they wanted. The scalability of the network was achieved.

The age of the telephone numbering system has come to an end. No one can remember phone numbers anymore. There are far too many of them. It was easier when one had two friends with telephones, a family number, and numbers of a few business colleagues. In the age of Facebook and Twitter, this is an impossibility. It not only beggars ease of use, it is also not scalable in the multiple of networks we all use today.

The technology to solve this issue has been available for some time now. It provides a network intelligence that provides user’s presence, availability, status and capabilities to people and devices. This information resides in the network’s ether and can be manipulated by people and/or devices. If we need to reach a person it will not be necessary any longer to troll multiple chat networks to find them online, or sift through Facebook status notifications to ascertain their mood or availability for a friendly chat. Rather, our device will show, in our contact list, this information gleaned from the network ether, and when we send an inquiry, then, seamlessly and obtrusively deliver it to wherever and on whatever device they happen to be using. Mr. Watson! Come here, Bell is supposed to have barked into his telephone, I need you! We can go back to the days of asking for whom we want to converse with, leaving the “reachability” problem to the network.

The technological underpinnings for constructing and deploying an ether are available and I am hopeful that the technology will bear fruit and not be desiccated.

Minsky once famously remarked that all business will be show business. Perhaps so, but it seems that before that, network business will be the business of auto-attendants, mediating our every act of communication.