Prof. Howard Weiss is providing Guest Posts while I am travelling abroad.
Recently Bloomberg reported that AT&T will end its operator service in 21 states, meaning that 3 million customers with digital landlines can’t dial 0 and get directory assistance. At the conclusion of World War I, there were roughly 180,000 operators employed by telecommunication companies. The number peaked to 350,000 in the 1950s but is now down to 550.
The decline in the need for operators is due to two obvious factors:.
1) There has been a steep increase in the number of households that have replaced landlines with cellphones. In 2003, 3% of adults had wireless only service; in 2008, 19% had wireless only, whereas as of June 2022, 71% of adults had wireless only service. Unsurprisingly, the percentage usage of wireless only service is related to age in that 89% of persons 25-29 years old do not have landlines whereas only 45% of persons aged 65 and older do not have only landlines. As of 2017, only 10% of the 455 million telephone numbers in the U.S. were for landlines.
2) There has been an increase in the use of the internet to find phone numbers.
Clearly, landlines and operators are both in the Decline stage of the life cycle that is displayed in Figure 5.2 in your Heizer/Render/Munson textbook while cell phones are somewhere between the Growth stage and Early Maturity stage Other products and services that are related to landlines are showing similar declines.
Answering Machines
The first commercially viable answering machine was developed in 1949. Answering machines became more widely used after the restructuring of AT&T in 1984, which was when the machines became affordable and sales reached one million units per year in the U.S.
Voicemail
The main difference between answering machines and voice mail is that messages on answering machines are stored locally whereas voicemail messages are stored in a different location, such as the cloud. Many businesses no longer use voicemail but instead rely on contact forms and emails. In addition, for many consumers, contact via the web is preferred over phone calls.
Classroom discussion questions:
1. What other products are in a growth stage due to the increase in cellphone usage?
2. What professions are in a growth stage due to the increase in cellphone usage?