First, telephones start out as expensive, only available in big cities. I'm not old enough to remember this, but I suspect it would have been an exclusive and prestigious club.

Eventually, telephones get widespread, and cheaper - I'm thinking like mid 90s, before mobile phones became mass market. This was "peak telephone", and it's what I remember from my youth. It was actually pretty good! As the author says, you could casually call your friends without seeming intrusive or clingy, and you could call most business or government agencies and talk to staff, getting quick responses to inquiries from knowledgeable people. Towards the end of this era, you have lots of information lines for time, weather, movies, phone banking services, etc.

Around this time, call centers are introduced - if you call a business or government agency, you don't end up talking to some knowledgeable subject matter expert about some topic, you talk to a call center operator who has a script, and if it's anything non-trivial, tries to transfer you, call back, or generally mess you around.

At this point, the phone network is so cheap, with so many subscribers that the temptation to abuse it to sell things to people is irresistible. Robo-dialling, answering machines, caller ID, and the Do Not Call registry are all introduced to the system, in a nuisance call arms race between callers and callees.

The call centers go to India, and the Philippines. The call center operators get placed behind a interactive voice response system (IVR). Now, it's pretty much impossible to get anything useful done by phone. Landlines are disconnected, people have voice numbers on their mobile devices, but refuse to answer calls from numbers that aren't in their address book.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the fundamental nature of communications networks - the story isn't much different for postal mail, fax, email, usenet, facebook. Success seems to kill the network in the end.

http://etler.com/FCC/pdf/CC/CC%2080-54/FCC%2080-607.pdf

As another note, I recently read that several hundred thousand Americans still rent landline phones from the phone company.

https://consumerist.com/2012/04/30/hundreds-of-thousands-of-...

I do that. If I don't know the number and that person really wants to talk to me, there is my answer machine where he/she can leave a message. I will never answer a call from a number I do not know, whatever the reason. If it is urgent, the person has to leave a message, so I can call him/her back. Why ? because I get spammed X times a day with numbers from unknown origins. The worst is masked numbers off course.

Actually, for a variety of reasons I think postal mail is going to be around for a long, long time, which is interesting since it predated the telephone. It could very well morph into "pick up from your local mail depot" for some people though.

In the B2B world at least, phone remains customers' preferred way to get more info prior to a sale and to get support afterwards. The same for B2C - at least on the support end of things, and provided you can readily talk to a human.

Also, analog phone calls are dead. But voice conversations are here to stay IMHO. There are plenty of "non-phone" alternatives to do those, e.g. Skype or using /call in Slack to sort out in 3-5 min what would take 15+ min to sort out in writing using texts or chats. Voice is just faster.

As someone who grew up more immersed in the digital world than the average, I want to point out that this isn't a universal truth. With practice, concise and clear text can convey more accurate and more useful information than a low-SNR vocal conversation.

Since concise and clear statements can be made in both media, the difference is entirely in the limitations of the transport medium, and written text lacks all of the characteristics I earlier mentioned.

I think what's really going on is that people who grew up analog don't see textual decisionmaking as "real", and need a familiar voice call to make things feel "official".

For me, my team is mostly +15 or +8 hours from me. So relying on voice is just impractical.

I spent 4 hours on the phone Friday, on 5 calls. I also sent a couple dozen texts. According to the article, I'm not a phone user.

I got that impression too. I think a better metric would be minutes spent talking compared to text messages sent. Even then, I can talk about a lot more in a minute of voice than I can in even five minutes of texting, given the lag between messages.

The article is riding the line between absurdity and parody.

People who are better at talking in person tend to feel this way. Others are better at emailing (I am like this, it gives me time to clarify my thoughts, and delete the petty insults), and think the opposite.

The only time I prefer to see face-to-face is when I need to build a relationship of trust with the person, and it's easier for some people (like you) to see that I am not ripping them off.

Whenever I write a report I always put the summary first because that is all that anyone who trusts me needs to read. The rest is supporting information and extended arguments in favour of the proposition that I make in the summary together with some notes about why alternatives are no good.

Of course, I never went to business school, I'm an engineer who started as a physicist.

I say this as somebody who used to prefer written communication. But I have come to realize that it is necessary to ask your audience, "Does that make sense?" after every major and minor point, and then listen to them reformulate what you just told them to make sure they actually got it.

I like your style, Walter.

I agree that mobile voice quality is terrible on most phones, especially when people choose to make their calls on speakerphone for some reason. At work we have landlines and actual desk phones with hard-wired headsets because the call quality is amazing compared to mobile. It lets you have a fully nuanced, tonal, relaxed conversation with everything but the facial expressions and hand gestures.

You make it sound so mysterious. Speaking for myself, I do it for long conversations because it's actually painful to keep the phone held to my ear for that long.

First of all, just to keep your hand raised up for an extended period of time is tiring. Even without any weight. (Modern phones are actually lighter than the Dialog handle was. )

Secondly, for many people, it is not convenient to touch the ear for a long time with any object.

Also you can send audio recordings in a text message. I think I once read on hn that in some crazy asian country that is the main method of communication: they don't text, they don't call, they send each other voice mails.

    cell < landline < skype

I like Skype or Hangouts. I think the latency is a lot lower. When I'm on the cell, I feel like I'm always talking over people.

Also, voice transmission only happens when the phone detects a voice, and this has the effect of clipping off the very first part of your sentence. I'd find this highly irritating, but I've noticed it a lot less in the last few years. Perhaps that has been fixed.

More of my friends are calling than in 2007 when it was texting, IM and then the mass rush to Facebook. Quite a few are now cutting down Facebook, a couple have left completely.

Maybe it's an age thing, but I find a 30 min call much more effective at "topping up the friendship" than any number of minutes online chat. I had a very early ICQ, and no end of IM since, but since smart phones the fragmentation has got so ridiculous I rarely bother. I think I'd need to install about 10 with 2-5 contacts in each to cover most and miss everyone using iMessage of course (never did understand why Apple didn't release for multiple platforms).

Actually, I find audio messages more like writing, in that one can think about what they want to say and there's no pressure to say something "right this moment", as with a telephone call. Likewise, the person receiving the audio message can listen to it when it suits them.

I just wish slack added the same feature, so I can drop a recording into a channel, instead of typing a wall of text.

Next year I might need to buy a phone which is about 12 times as expensive, has worse signal reliability, and which has a battery which will last me literally one 14th the time my current one does, and which will take up about twice the space in my pocket, and it will be a shattering liability every time I take it with me. All the while, it will have so much software on it and so much attack surface that I will need to stay abreast of hundreds upon hundreds of megabytes of updates twice a month (at least) just so that people don't commit fraud with my identity.

Seriously, screw this noise, get me out of here.

Source?

In all honesty, without a shadow of a lie, the master strategy of the VP of Technology was to get a fax line into every home and business....... in 2015.

Oh yes, they really can be that clueless.

If the auditor is an idiot, you can get a moderate finding for doing things like applying a security patch that isn't FIPS validated, or similar nonsense.

A much fairer way is to look at how many times you speak with your friends via text vs calling them. I find that I have many small text conversations but when we get together by phone it's usually a long conversation of thirty minutes or more.

I do not think the telephone call is going away. When a majority of smart phones sold only allow texting is when I will believe it. I do think that the landline phone sadly is going to become an endangered species, I will regret losing mine it's my secret weapon.

2007 was also, incidentally, the last time I had a telephone that actually functioned decently as a telephone - the venerable Nokia brickphone. Since then, I've had nothing but grief with terrible signal, mics and speakers that cut out intermittently, and antennas that cannot pick up towers that are in line-of-sight with smartphones. They are, however, lovely for doing email and texting, which have the additional benefit of leaving behind a persistent paper trail so that there is an actual record of what is said that can be referred to later.

In a business context, I try to route substantive communications through email (or, if internal, through systems like Slack). There's nothing like a searchable corpus to minimize ambiguity, commemorate who said what, and when, and in response to which questions.

Likewise, there's a certain kind of project counterparty who inevitably tries to drive substantive communications through phone calls -- specializing in the dreaded dozen-person multi-time-zone conference call, featuring the ever-popular ten-minute parade of welcome tones, "who just joined?", and mystery attendees. These email-avoiders are the ones for whom calls are a tacit means of trying to project power, and ambiguity is a project management feature, not a bug, bound up with their own personal risk management strategy.

You probably know the type: when asked a detailed question by email that requires a specific and accountable response, they reply "Let's set up a call. -- Sent from my iPhone".

N.B. I like iPhones just fine, but please, turn off that sig.

That said, there is typically no intelligence behind 95% of conference calls with more than 5 parties.

You can defuse a potential conflict by voice call because the medium allows airing of issues in a more candid fashion, and allows more rapid convergence onto common ground compared to text based communication.

I think that bad news is best communicated along channels that allow some kind of non-verbal perception (on a phone call largely by judging the nature and length of the silences). Face to face is best, but synchronous voice communication is a second best.

Those situations are so common at Microsoft that they put a button in Outlook specifically to mute those threads.

Be careful with "nothing to hide" arguments. All else aside, sometimes it's nice to voice a frustrated opinion about a person without creating a permanent record.