by Harry Newton Harry Newton@email.msn.com Computer Technology - September, 1998
Phone service is a marketer's nightmare. You can't see it, feel it, touch it or smell it. And it all sounds the same. Thus, price is your only sales weapon. Price is the worst sales tool. For years the industry has searched (in vain) for the magic "value add." Microsoft may have found it in the "humble" Web browser.
I'm on my phone far more than my PC. Most of us are. My PC is "friendly." It has a big screen, neat colors, menus,mice and help.
My phone is a disgrace. It has a tiny, unreadable acreen. It lacks "backspace erase." It has a zillion features that I don't use because I can't figure out how to access them.
My speed dial won't dial through auto attendants, My phone doesn't know when it hits voicemaL Seventy-five percent of my calls end in voice-mail jail. I have to psych myself to leave the same dreary "Hi-It's-Harry-Call-Me" message. All manual. Again and again.
The phone - that stupid plastic thing sitting on my desk - is bereft of intelligence. For the 85% of us who work in offices, the phone has become our biggest time waster.
The solution? Make my PC my phone. Throw out my phone. There are huge benefits:
· Suddenly, I can use features. That means there will be millions more. The phone biz stopped creating features 10 years ago. No one could use them. Why make them?
· Suddenly, I can be integrated with my desktop apps. Use the same database for e-mailing and for phoning. Combine my voicemail with my e-mail and faxmail.
· Suddenly, I have intelligence and memory desktop. I can save time. Have my PC dial numbers, leave messages. Only connect me when we hit a live one.
· Suddenly, I can save $650 because I don't have to buy a fancy-schmancy "executive" phone.
The mind boggles. Right now, I'm sitting at my PC. I'm on a single dial-up line. I have four copies of Internet Explorer open. I'm looking at four web sites. I'm typing this article. I'm sending e-mails. I'm receiving e-mails. All simultaneously.
Anything simultaneous on today's phone gets a busy or voicemail.
One hundred years ago, today's phone system was right and bright. All calls went through operators. They knew where you were. They knew how to find who and what you wanted. They were the ultimate online intelligence.
Today's phone system has automated the intelligence out.
The good news is tomorrov's phone service will not be today's dreary phone system. The country's best minds and the country's hottest venture monies are not working on computing problems. They're working on the future phone system. Call it "Next-Gen" telephony.
New backbone building tools are eploding. IP telephony is so real, so powerful and so persuasive that new long-distance companies, Qwest and Level3, are going IP Telephony.
How significant is that? Qwest's potential capacity exceeds AT&T, MCI, Sprint and Worldcom put together. By a big margin.
I wrote about carrier class IP switches in June. Since then Cisco has bought Summa Four. Nortel bought Bay Networks. Tellabs bought Ciena and Coherent. And the freneticism continues.
The standards to makes Next-Gen are all here. Last month we got T.38 - an ITU-T standard for shipping reliable fax across the Internet. Implement it and faxes overseas will be fast, clean and not suffer today's 10% to 15% disconnects.
We have learned how to make IP phone calls run flawlessly and cleanly across packet networks. Stay with 64 Kbps coding across cheap backbones. Compress to 8 Kbps when, and only when, we need to. Half the cost of an IP telephone calI is the G.723's compression to 6-8 Kbps. Avoid that compression, save the cost, cut the latency in compression. (Think of how long it takes to fill a packet. Then you have to work on it.)
Dialogic's CT Gonnect gives us the middleware necessary to run multiple CT apps on one platform - NT, UNIX, SUN, etc.
One loophole remains. We lack the smarts at the desktop to control it and to add personalized intelligence which today's overly rigid, overly-expensive, unable-to-access SS7 network has never been able to deliver. Despite the billions and billions of dollars of investment.
Thus tomorrow's gigantic opportunity. The humble desktop browser reincarnated as an intelligence communications device. The ultimate telephony assistant.
I can smell it coming. Think killer apps. First there were spreadsheets. Then word processing. Then databases. And soon PIMs - personal information manager assistants that are made for the rest of us.
They're Microsoft's Outlook reborn as an active assistant, an integral part of the browser. This "new" browser will become your interface to the world. Who cares for operating systems any longer? Every laptop comes with an intelligent, all-seeing, all-knowing, never-resting, speech-recognizing personal assistant.
Now you know the real significance of what's happening in Washington.
It's not one Justice Department egomaniac midget pitched against a bunch of Washington-hating computer nerds.
It's Microsoft's future. I hope they win.
I can't imagine what voicemail jail and the lack of intelligence in today's phone system is costing American's annually in lost productivity. I know what it's costing me. And I'm fed up.