"the RBOCS treatment of the new dot.coms was not only the single most important cause of the dot com crash"
Oh, puh-leeze! Pets.com anyone? Dotcoms crashed because dotcoms were a bubble -- really stupid ideas that never should have been funded in the first place. For more information, look up "gravity" in the dictionary.
and the telcos are in trouble because never in the history of the world have so many billions been spent toward such trivial ends with so little oversight about the cumulative affect. OVER 9O% OF THE FIBER IN THE GROUND IS NOT USED! How's that for the free market at work? The deregulation of the phone industry makes communism look good!
100 years from now this will be regarded as the era of the "glass burying cult" because that's all that fiber is -- glass in the ground. My guess is it will NEVER be used, because we've gotten too good at pushing more information through existing glass, and because wireless and other technologies (if only better glass) will make the existing stuff obsolete by the time more glass is needed. Imagine the good that could have been done (keep libraries open on weekends, do basic research, subsidize a few railroads instead of highways, throw a party!) with all the billions wasted.
The really serious issues are the ones no one talks about.... do we really need a society of throw away batteries whose really great plan is to mezmerize its citizens further with movies pumped into cell phones? Zowie, the internet, how cool: now we can check stock prices and ask in instant chat "what are you wearing" in the bath tub and in Star Bucks. Whoopee! Hey, wait a minute while I ignore you and order gerbils from Pets.com using my cell phone!
There's a lot about the 90's that was really dumb, but you can't make the RBOCS your fall guy. We were delusional and some of us are still delusional.
"130 years and these people who are protected gave us the Princess Phone"
that's a funny line, but it's also ignorant.
Speaking as a genuine disgruntled old fart, the pre-1984 phone service WORKED -- simple, no stress, with 911 and information always THERE quick and reliable. And it generated the monopoly capital to fund Bell Labs, one of the greatest achievements in the history of humanity (a bunch of odd geniuses wandering around creating the future) which is now the palest shadow of its former self. America has very very few places left doing pure research anymore.
AND the phone company was a lot more advanced than you suggest. it was the OLD phone company that had IDSN ready to go and available in the 1980s -- long before the first internet browswer was created (Mosaic circa 1994) and long before most people knew what online was. The chaos that followed the 1984 AT&T break up arguably delayed the advent of highspeed online access -- the IDSN era (which was a natural precursor to DSL and cable) never occurred as it should have.
- Charles |
