long-run patterns in communications service adoption
Communications services today are perceived to succeed or fail within months. Within that time, fashion may be more important than economic fundamentals, and long-run patterns can easily be obscured. Historical data helps to provide an alternate view. Consider telephone service in the U.S. in 1927 and 2007. In 1927, telephone service had been widely available [...]
Tagged: telephones
COB-43: bureaucrats contribute to their own support
Bureaucrats do not merely sit at their desks, calmly floating in an environment that outside energy supports. Bureaucrats play an active role in generating their own support. Scientists that levitated a frog insightfully explain: As you might well know, all matter in the universe consists of small particles called atoms and each atom contains electrons [...]
communications bill auditing and consulting
Analysis of actual prices paid for communications services is likely to be more valuable to consumers than surveys of advertised offerings and prices. Rapidly increasing number and variety of offerings and prices makes price surveys more difficult and less useful. Historically, a small industry of communications service consultants has provided bill auditing and service-choice consulting [...]
Tagged: price information
structural change boosts business communications
Because large business customers are much larger and more geographically concentrated than large residential customers, business communications services tend to be more competitive than residential communications services. Nonetheless, from 1980 to 2007, business lines rose from 25% to 37% of public switched telephone lines of larger U.S. incumbent local-exchange telephone companies.[1] Over that same period, [...]
Tagged: telephones
the spectators
One thousand, three hundred, and thirty years ago at Karbala in present-day Iraq, Iman Husayn ibn Ali, a grandson of the prophet of Islam, led a small, traveling group of 72 persons. This group included children, women, and elderly persons, as well as a small number of horsemen and infantrymen dedicated to Husayn. They confronted [...]
Tagged: review
making sense is biological coding of sensory ecology
Dale Purves’ Lab provides profound and accessible teaching on the function of biological sensory systems. The point of biological sensory systems is not to perceive accurately the real world, but to respond successfully in the circumstances in which the organism has evolved and lives. Phylogenetic and ontogenetic experiences determine perception-action cycles, which are empirical sensory [...]
real goods in well-established social networking
Every Sunday afternoon, Japanese youths gather on Jingu Bridge in Tokyo to display their fashions, to express themselves through their attire, and to socialize with others doing the same. Shops in the area have opened to sell this street chic fashion known as Harajuku. The shops both take fashion merchandising leads from the gathered youths [...]
Tagged: content, Japan
cloud services circa 1987
From a New York Telephone advertisement in 1987: Intellipath II Digital Centrex Service is the latest step in the continuing evolution of Centrex. It’s the first fully digital telecommunications system that requires no major switching equipment on your premises: it’s in New York Telephone’s central office. Intellipath II offers 100 features: full-featured voice, full data [...]
Tagged: services