Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway
From: bet@orion.mc.duke.edu (Bennett Todd)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Phone Design For Humans
Message-ID: 
Date: 28 Sep 89 15:10:02 GMT
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Reply-To: bet@orion.mc.duke.edu (Bennett Todd)
Organization: Diagnostic Physics, Radiology, DUMC
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X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 415, message 4 of 5

In-reply-to: dsacg1!dlscg1!drms3002@cis.ohio-state.edu (Andy Meijers)

If our experience is any indicator, there is little hope for improvement
in telephone instrument design.

What happened here is that AT&T representatives wooed senior
administrators; when time came to replace our old key system, which
worked wonderfully but was at the limits of its capacity and couldn't be
expanded, there was no technical evaluation of phone systems. We ended
up getting some AT&T gee-whiz system with LEDs and whatnot. The
telephones have to get wall power to work, insofar as they work at all,
which is mostly not. This is lovely when you want to call to report that
the power is out. The human engineering is pathetic. The system is
constantly enjoying "software glitches" which prevent phones from
ringing when they are called, or spontaneously trigger some kind of
forwarding without illuminating the forwarding indicator.

I don't have any reason to believe that AT&T weasles couldn't grease in
to enough other organizations the same way to make for a profitable
business.

I'm pretty sure I understand the precise reasons for the design changes;
the new phones offer the following benefits:

	1. They charge disproportionately much for them.
	2. They are more fragile than the older ones -- which means that
	   they will have to be replaced sooner.
	3. The poor fools who actually have to *use* the damned things
	   loathe them, so when the weasles come along and sell
	   management on a whole new replacement system in two or three
	   years, there won't be anything like the complaints that rang
	   through the office when the old key system with the old
	   massive phones was taken out.

Equipment lifetimes of several decades aren't so good for repeat sales.

However, this isn't all to our loss. I used to think that having a
telephone was really important. I have been cured of this belief.
Between GTE and AT&T, I don't particularly worry about being hard to
reach by phone at work, and impossible at home.

-Bennett
bet@orion.mc.duke.edu

[Moderator's Note: But Bennett, if it weren't for your phone -- or someone's
phone -- how would you receive this Digest each day?  Even though you are
not enamored of voice telephony, apparently the use of the Devil's Instrument
for data transmission passes muster with you, eh?   PT]