Three years ago, I predicted that voice mail use was gong to
decline, and I also vowed to NOT set up a voice mail message on my personal
phone:
Then events took an unexpected turn.
A few weeks ago, my 3 year old Samsung Galaxy 6 committed suicide.
I took it to a Sprint service center, where it was determined that the battery
was dead AND the motherboard itself was fried, leaving me no alternative but to
buy a new phone. I considered getting either an LG or another Samsung, but the
tech that I talked with recommended an I-phone because (in his experience) they
were more reliable. Price-wise, the i8 is a tad more expensive than the alternatives,
but not appreciably so. I opted for the i8+ since it had a slightly larger
screen. If you paid full retail for the thing, it would be over $800. However,
the tech recommended a reconditioned i8+, which still came with a warranty. Cash
price was $449, but I could also pay $18 a month for 18 months and have it
completely paid for.
My new phone has a number of features that I absolutely love. One
is Facetime, which is literally a modern version of Skype. The phone also lets
you send a text message by TALKING to your phone instead of having to type in all
the letters.
It also comes with voice mail built in, which I have come to
appreciate because it allows you to READ the voice mail without having to
listen to the message, which makes it much easier to decide whether to call
back or not.
I still don’t call back numbers I don’t recognize until I have
checked them out on Google. A recent trend that I have noticed is that those “phishing”
calls have figured out a way to use a local number so that you are less likely
to ignore them.
Last summer, Apple (founded on April 1, 1976) became the first
company in the world to hit a market valuation of $1 trillion, largely due to the
fact that it has the most innovative, and useful, products. My sister’s house
is “full Apple” since the household has 2 Macintosh laptops, 2 I-phones, and an
Alexa (which is actually made by Amazon).
If you look at the list of the most profitable companies on
the Forbes list, you’ll notice that ALL of them are tech companies. The big returns
are no longer going to be found in oil and gas, steel, or mining companies, a
fact that not all of our leaders understand.
Google, incidentally, is only 20 years old, but its market capitalization
is $825 billion. One of the founders of the company is a Russian immigrant
named Sergey Brin, who is now the 13th richest person on the planet,
with a net worth of around $50 billion.
Amazon was founded on July 5, 1994 as on online book store,
but quickly expanded into other lines. The queen size bed frame that I
assembled earlier this morning was delivered to us by Amazon. The company has a
market capitalization of $841 billion, and founder Jeff Bezos is now the world’s
richest man.
The message that this story should impart to you is that
technology changes rapidly, so the decisions you make about technology today
may be outdated in a few years, and the prime example of that is AOL.
America Online has
its roots dating back to 1985, when it was part of a company called PlayNET. By 1995, AOL had 20 million active users. AOL was one of the early pioneers of
the Internet in the mid-1990s, and the most
recognized brand on the web in the United States. It originally provided a
dial-up service to millions of Americans, as well as providing
a web portal, e-mail, instant messaging and later a web browser following its purchase
of Netscape. In 2001, at the height of its
popularity, it purchased the media conglomerate Time Warner in the largest merger in U.S.
history. AOL rapidly declined thereafter, partly due to the decline of dial-up
and rise of broadband. AOL was
eventually spun off from
Time Warner in 2009, with Tim Armstrong appointed
the new CEO. Under his leadership, the company invested in media brands and
advertising technologies.
On June 23, 2015, AOL was acquired
by Verizon Communications for
$4.4 billion. In the following months, AOL also made a deal with Microsoft.
I don’t know ANYONE who still has an AOL account, but if you
are pining for “the good old days”, this clip will bring back some memories for
you:
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