Not Everybody Goes with the Technology Flow

Fred Wilson has a great blog post up about how long it takes technology to die.

I’m sitting here at terminal four at JFK waiting to pick up my son who is returning from a long weekend in LA. And right next to me is a bank of pay phones (five of them) that are doing a bang up business.

I’ve been sitting here for 20 minutes and there’s been at least one in use all the time. Right now, three of the five are in use.

I can think of a few reasons why someone with a cell phone might opt instead for a pay phone (dead battery, needing to use some kind of prepaid card, etc) but honestly I can’t think of the last time I used a pay phone.

The other day I was commenting to my kids that pay phones are largely gone from the streets of NYC. When I moved here 25+ years ago, there was a pay phone on many corners.

So pay phones are clearly a legacy techonology in a long period of decline. But the past 20 minutes sitting here reminds me that old technologies take a long time to die unless they are rendered completely useless like analog TVs.

One of his commenters said, “it’s amazing that we think that everyone has a cell phone.” So true, and Cacey and I learned this personally.

A few months ago, we killed our landline. Saved $60/month, and we weren’t using it much anyway. Then we hired a baby sitter and went out to dinner.

About halfway to dinner, we remembered something to tell the sitter. As we started to reach for our phones, we realized we didn’t know the sitter’s cell number. So we called her family, and lo and behold, she didn’t have a cell number. Oops.

Turns out, she was trying to reach us too. Walking around the house searching for a telephone, and trying to convince our two year old to tell her where he’d hid the phone.

Fortunately, her kind parents were nice enough to run over a cell phone to our off-the-grid house so we could chat yet again.

It was a good reminder that not everyone thinks it’s a good idea to pay money to a telecom conglomerate for the privilege of being connected anywhere, all the time.

Photo Credit: Fred Wilson