Personal essays
When the world catches up
Going Mobile
We didn’t used to carry our phones around with us.
The first time I ever used a mobile phone was when I had to travel to Buffalo to interview for a job and Kim was due with Elena.
My father-in-law charged up his mobile and gave it to me to take in the car. They would call me in case the baby came early and I could drive back from Buffalo.
Fortunately, the phone never rang and I never needed to receive or make a call with it.
“Didn’t you check your email or send a text,” you ask.
No. The only thing that that phone did was make and receive calls.
Also it, and its case were huge.
Without it there was no way for anyone to reach me while I was driving and I would have had to look up and leave the numbers of everywhere I would be.
Phones were tied to locations.
The old days
In the old days when we were looking for work we’d include a phone number but phone numbers were tied to a physical location.
What did we do if we weren’t there?
Well if it was our business number and we worked for a company, they would often have a receptionist. If we weren’t there when a call came in, the receptionist would write a message on a pink pad (it didn’t have to be pink but it often was) and when we’d wall by the front desk we’d get a stack of messages with the name of the caller, their number, and a note on what they wanted.
Sales people, actors, and other folks who often weren’t in an office needed other ways to collect these messages. They’d call in to the receptionist or some service to see if they had any messages.
Why didn’t the receptionist or service call the sales person or actor? Because they didn’t have phones in those days. They would stop somewhere where there was a phone and call in.
Two innovations made this simpler.
Beepers meant that someone could call a little device and leave a number that you should call back. Unless you recognized the number you didn’t know who called or why but you could call back and say, “Hi, I’m so-and-so (you’d say your actual name not so-and-so), someone paged me from this number.”
We also got affordable answering machines. We could call them and type in a code to playback messages. Different numbers allowed us to replay messages, delete them, or skip them.
Early phones had a voice mail system that worked exactly the same. If you wanted to hear your messages you would access your voice mail and punch keys to play, replay, delete, or skip messages.
Voice mail on the iPhone was different. It was visual. You could look at your messages and quickly see who they were from, what number called you, and whether or not you’d listened to it. If you needed to go back and listen to a message from yesterday you didn’t need to tediously skip through the three you’d gotten since. You just tapped on the one you wanted.
That thing that was brand new fifteen years ago is not table stakes for any smart phone. We just assume that that’s the way voice mail works. In fact, now I can see a transcript of the message without playing it back.
Maps
I was thinking about that this past week when I had coffee with a friend of mine and a woman called out to us from her car to ask directions to Euclid Heights Boulevard.
She was in a new fancy car and had her phone in her left hand.
She had maps on her car and her phone but was asking directions.
We told her to take a left and it was at the second light.
Then we reminisced about the old days. The days before cars and phones had maps in them.
Big cities had these books with yellow and red covers. Each page had a detailed street map of some area and there was an overall map that showed how the individual maps fit together. If you were navigating using map 3 and the road went off the right side of the page, you’d look at the overall map and see that you needed to turn to map 14 to pick up the trail.
Before we drove around with phones in our hands we drove with these books in our laps or on the seats beside us when we were in a neighborhood we didn’t know.
Now our phones and cars have all of this information for us. Or so I thought.
Car maps
Thursday I’m returning my Tesla. I mostly loved the car but didn’t like the company and couldn’t support the owner so I’m not sad that the lease has come to an end.
Their maps are pretty good. Sometimes the route they suggest isn’t the one I’d take - but that’s ok.
When I first got the car, traffic information was included with the map. After a year I had to pay a fee - I think it was $5 a month but it could have been $10 - to keep the traffic information and the streaming audio channels. I didn’t need either so I didn’t pay the fee but the maps still work fine.
There’s a side of me that thinks for what I paid for the car they could have provided the traffic information as part of the maps - but traffic information isn’t essential.
Maps, on the other hand, have become like visual voice mail. They are table stakes for an electric car. Every one I tested had maps and most of them showed your turn-by-turn in front of you in addition to the full map on the entertainment (I will not say infotainment) system.
So I got my new Chevy Bolt and it comes with On Star.
On Star was way ahead of many systems. It provided maps and assistance when these required dedicated hardware. I think the original maps data was provided in a CD or DVD that could be updated.
On Star was so far ahead that it didn’t notice that everyone else caught up.
If I want to use their maps, the nice lady on the phone told me, it’s $39 per month.
The Chevy Bolt is a nice, aggressively priced, electric car. Why aren’t maps part of the package?
Well, you can use Apple Maps or Google Maps.
You can. And I do. But they have not enabled turn-by-turn directions for Apple Maps so if I look at the turn-by-turn directions in front of me it’s an up arrow with the direction I’m traveling in displayed.
As useful as it is to know that I’m heading east, I’d rather know the speed limit and that in a quarter of a mile I need to turn left on Richmond road.
I think it’s a good reminder that when we’re so far ahead of everyone else, we need to work to make sure we stay ahead. It’s easy to lose track and not notice when the world catches up and passes us.
Facebook is on one of the old SUN Microsystems campuses. Google occupies the old Silicon Graphics campus. These were big successful companies that were way ahead of everyone else and didn’t notice when the world caught up.
Maps in a car feels like that.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 126. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe