Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 22:58:35 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Robert Clark <res03db2@gte.net> Cc: Mike Meyer <mwm-dated-1021937567.3082d8@mired.org>, Nils Holland <nils@daemon.tisys.org>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The road ahead? Message-ID: <3CE34A8B.7D999E2C@mindspring.com> References: <20020516004909.A9808@daemon.tisys.org> <15586.61471.456290.764885@guru.mired.org> <20020515211922.J1282@darkstar.gte.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Robert Clark wrote: > (IMO) Pen based PDAs are just so much crap. If people will throw all > that money at such inelegant crap, there has to be a market for a well > thought out speech based device. If for no other reason than it would > sell well with the illiterate. Illiterate people tend to have small disposable incomes. They are not our target market. > When I'm in a meeting, and my cellphone rings, why doesn't a voice answer > the call and say, "Mr Clark is in a meeting, but he is will take your > call in a few seconds.", as I'm leaving to take the call in the hallway > where my voice won't disturb people? 1) Because Qualcomm reserves the right to reprogram and change the features on your phone at will, and without notice, so you can't trust a feture that's there Tuesday to still be there Friday? 2) Because you forget to press the button to put it into "meeting mode" (today, that means "vibrate"), and there's no button labelled "Just a second..."? 3) Because people aren't permitted to hack their own features into their phones, like they can with computer programs, because phones actually have to be reliable in emergencies? 8-). > In a market where everyone is falling over each other to bring out WAP, > why don't good features ever show up? Ah, an easy one! Because the idiots behind WAP look at it as a means of pushing content at you, the same way they look at the Internet as a means of pushing content at you, rather than as a person-to-person communications medium. Drink from the firehose! Pay for the right to have the business end of the firehose jammed in your face! Pay monthly for thousands of gallons of water, when what you wanted as a 7oz paper cup of water! Pay for message units, when we know that you want to pay flat rate! ...Mostly, it probably because they don't realize that last year, people spent more money on personal phone calls than the U.S.'s total defense budget (~1.24 trillion dollars). Good article on "First Monday" on this: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_2/odlyzko/ -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3CE34A8B.7D999E2C>