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Communications

The Slow Death of Voice Mail 237

Posted by Soulskill from the at-the-tone,-please-hang-up-and-send-me-an-email dept.
HughPickens.com writes: Duane D. Stanford reports at Bloomberg that Coca-Cola's Atlanta Headquarters is the latest big company to ditch its old-style voice mail, which requires users to push buttons to scroll through messages and listen to them one at a time. The change went into effect this month, and a standard outgoing message now throws up an electronic stiff arm, telling callers to try later or use "an alternative method" to contact the person. Techies have predicted the death of voice mail for years as smartphones co-opt much of the office work once performed by telephones and desktop computers. Younger employees who came of age texting while largely ignoring voice mail are bringing that habit into the workforce. "People north of 40 are schizophrenic about voice mail," says Michael Schrage. "People under 35 scarcely ever use it." Companies are increasingly combining telephone, e-mail, text and video systems into unified Internet-based systems that eliminate overlap. "Many people in many corporations simply don't have the time or desire to spend 25 minutes plowing through a stack of 15 to 25 voice mails at the end or beginning of the day," says Schrage.

In 2012, Vonage reported its year-over-year voicemail volumes dropped 8%. More revealing, the number of people bothering to retrieve those messages plummeted 14%. More and more personal and corporate voicemail boxes now warn callers that their messages are rarely retrieved and that they're better off sending emails or texts. "The truly productive have effectively abandoned voicemail, preferring to visually track who's called them on their mobiles," concludes Schrage. "A communications medium that was once essential has become as clunky and irrelevant as Microsoft DOS and carbon paper."

Comment Re:DDOS + Poison Pill (Score 1) 135

by ron_ivi (#48357721) Attached to: Tor Project Mulls How Feds Took Down Hidden Websites

tagged the packets

And in case someone thinks that's the hard part, note that tagging the packets is pretty easy. Just send a pattern of large-packet,small-packet,large-packet,small-packet .... ; and look for that pattern.

Just spam the .onion site with tons of that traffic, and look on the relay nodes you control for whichever machine they're sending the most of that pattern.

Comment ZUNE (Score 2) 150

by ron_ivi (#48196275) Attached to: 'Microsoft Lumia' Will Replace the Nokia Brand
I love how Zune has now become a word for Microsoft screwing a partner.

https://gigaom.com/2006/07/22/...

Microsoft Partners, You Been Zunked

More on that some other day, but the real and perhaps the only story in the news is that Microsoftâ(TM)s partners â" from device makers to music services â" just got double crossed by the company they choose to believe in. I like to call it Zun-ked (a tiny take off on Punked.)

Comment Actually, they're *saving* chicago that much. (Score 1) 398

by ron_ivi (#48194829) Attached to: Speed Cameras In Chicago Earn $50M Less Than Expected
Whenver a speed camera gives a ticket it sucks money out of a community (sharing with arizona or wherever the company is that runs most of them).

Yet the camera marketing companies keep spinning them as ways to provide money to cities.

In reality, that only works for the rare city where most drivers are from out of town.

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