I am currently watching The Italian Job. Great movie with a great theme song…. what goes around, comes around! Okay, eight months ago, I did a little piece for Rafat’s PaidContent, Is Voice the Ultimate Killer App?. Now pundits have discovered the same – Clay Shirky writes Voice as The App Killer: Voice has so much value, in fact, that people are putting it in products that have little or no relationship to the traditional phone, leading to potentially enormous displacement. Kevin Werbach chimes in and says, “voice revenues are going to decline drastically. Voice is the killer app, but that does not imply it is going to continue generating bountiful revenues for long. It will become just another application riding on top of a broadband connection (wireless or wireline, mostly wireless).” No shit! Need new punditry because this shit is something even us hacks know!
I’ve always thought that Voice is the telecom equivalent to the Wang word processor.
Before PCs really took off, lots of offices had this machines/computers called a Wang, and it only ran one app, an complex word processor.
People had to be specifically skilled to operate the Wang.
As the PC continued to evolve and march into offices, usually on weekends and by cover of the petty cash account, people started the first great digital migration to WordStar and then WordPerfect.
To complete againts the marauding interlopers, Wang, by now a huge multi-billion dollar company vs. a couple of guys working from the kitchen table in their underwear, even decided to enter the PC hardware business themselves.
Alas it didn’t work out for Wang, and they become, if not the first, then close to it, digital roadkill. A true life modern day buggy whip company.