Currently, Smartphones and tablets might be the hot technology but history says it’s all just another fad. Twenty years from now, almost nobody will own either device. Seems unbelievable, but the same technology that makes them hot today will make them not tomorrow. If this sounds ridiculous, consider what happened to another “must-have” technology that almost nobody uses any more: the fax machine.
Back in 1991, the Baby Bells were predicting an explosion of landlines and a corresponding shortage of phone numbers because “everyone will need a fax machine.” Phone companies offered to lease fax machines for “only (US)$60 a month on a three-year contract.” Newspapers were offering early faxes of their main stories to subscribers for a buck a day. Every office supply store had shelf after shelf of fax machines for home and office use.
All those dreams got trashed by the Internet and cheap computers. Email attachments killed the fax machine boom. Today a fax “machine” is a $1 chip in a laptop, and like the modem chip, nobody even bothers to configure it. Faxing the newspaper? Newspapers are dropping like old news, and paywalls are mostly money-losers. Even those cries of “mom, we need a second line for the Internet” are just a dim memory. Instead of two, three or four landlines, many homes now have none. Indeed, many existing “landlines” are actually VoIP phones.
