the end of the telephone number

It’s only a matter of time. There’s been subtle technology creep toward eliminating numbers for a long time; those speed dials on your home and office phones, the handy directories in your home cordless, and the elegant dial by contact functionality that RIM and Apple have provided.

Telephone numbers have been a necessary evil that we continue to tolerate but should be considered more carefully. Elimination of obtuse 10 digit numbers represents a material opportunity to make our lives easier and is likely to provide very significant cost savings and productivity gains.

Think about it; you either call a person or an organization and the fact that you need to find or remember and then dial a random 10 digit code is increasingly looking like an anachronism. Thanks to the continued convergence of voice and data, or computers and telephones, the need for the random number continues to diminish. As I mentioned earlier, the mobile industry has done a nice job for us of reducing the need for numbers with simple, easy-to-use dial by name directories and voice activated dialing. Ironically, the wireline industry providers of our home and business telephones have continued to demonstrate a complete lack of imagination in this area offering little innovation in service since the implementation of automated switching over 50 years ago. (This strikes me as a reflection how regulated oligopoly dampens market driven innovation.)

Not only do we have all the technology pieces readily available never to have to deal with a 10 digit code again, we have the means to know who’s calling and thanks to the miracle of presence services if the person we’re calling is available. Nicholas Negroponte, in his incredible manifesto for the digital age “Being Digital” (1988) suggested that our grandchildren will be confounded to hear that there was a time when we answered telephones “hello” without any idea who was calling or why.

Technologies should make things more convenient and efficient for all of us eliminating the need to track down arbitrary 10 digit number sequences to have a voice conversation. How would you like to have to find a 9 digit IP address to visit a website? I want to push a button and talk to a person or company without having to locate and dial a code. I manage to do this with my Blackberry or iPhone and on my landlines with my innovedia softphone directory and soon my Lypp Outlook plugin. Here’s to the end of the phone number, can’t come soon enough for me!

tj