Twelve Things That Will Be Obsolete in 10 Years

"We should go for coffee sometime ... Can I have your IP address?" The web will become the standard for all communications modes.

Remember Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone? How about Dick Tracy’s wristwatch phone? Let’s not forget the videophone from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. These all seemed like exotic futuristic ideas at the time, but they’re totally laughable today. Voice has been – and will always be – central to how we communicate, and the telephone is arguably the most important invention since the Gutenberg press. It’s impossible to imagine modern life without one, and most of us typically use at least two different phones day to day, if not more.

While the PSTN – Public Switched Telephone Network – is right up there in terms of modern engineering feats, things barely evolved until the early 1970s, when rotary dials gave way to push-button phones. The next major step forward was cellular phones, and after that the rise of the web, which in turn paved the way for mobile broadband, and that takes us to the present, in which smartphones are the norm.

Today, the phone is so ubiquitous it’s hard to imagine what the next wave of innovation will be. There really aren’t many new frontiers left for telephony, but the world of voice communications is evolving in exciting and somewhat surprising ways. People will never lose their appetite for talking, short of an Orwellian scenario in which free speech becomes an endangered species, but let’s put that on hold for now.

You might be surprised to hear this, but I would contend that by 2020, the telephone as we know it will be long gone. I really don’t see the shoe phone or wristwatch phone keeping the trend going, and mobile phones – well, we won’t be calling them phones by then. Seriously, how often do you use your iPhone for telephony? If you’re under 30, chances are good you’ve already dropped your home phone service, and if you’re under 20, there’s just no way you’re going to be a landline subscriber when you’re on your own.

In short, the concept of telephony is becoming subsumed by other modes of communication. It’s not that phones will become obsolete – rather, the way we communicate is changing. With the advent of IP technology – Internet Protocol – the very nature of telephony and its underlying economics has drastically changed, arguably for the better. The net result is that telephony as a standalone business is becoming increasingly less viable, and in the internet age, there is simply more money to be made with video and data services.

Just as the telephone supplanted the telegraph, the internet is in the process of supplanting telephony. We are quickly becoming a web-centric society, and people are spending more time online than they are watching TV and talking on the phone. There is an irreversible shift taking place here, and as the web experience keeps improving, our time and attention will migrate there – and away from our phones and TV sets. We’re moving into a world of converged devices, communications, and networks.

Think of how we experience media today. At home or at work, most people multi-task and typically engage with several media streams at once. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but we all do it, and the internet has been incredibly effective at changing our habits with us hardly noticing. As we continue down this path, the notion of picking up the phone to make a call will seem quaint and so pre-web. Why do that when you can just click to call from your PC screen or TV? Notice how I said click to call – and not click to dial. Eventually, the web will be the standard for all communications modes, at which point telephone numbers will disappear and be replaced by IP addresses.

This may seem a long way off, but it isn’t. Will this be a better world? I’m not sure. However, as the internet generation becomes the dominant demographic – and it will by 2020 – I have no doubt this will be the way we communicate. We’ll be talking as much as ever before, but in the context of a multimedia experience. This may not be what your local phone company has in mind, but don’t worry – by that time, they’ll have morphed into something else.