Yes, yesterday was the “Good Ol’ Days.” Even more surprising, I am talking about technology packaged in a new and frightening package – even worse than the REDRUM in that ski lodge with Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
Let me regress to three years ago. Yes, I said yesterday was the good ol’ days and it still is, but I need to fill you in on some past history so you can understand the recent history and then the future.
OK. Three years ago, I had a Cingular 8525 – one of those do-all phones. It was the bleeding edge technology and the only reason I had it was that our company’s president, Julian, had one and I was given the task of supporting it.
It would do just about everything, including scratch your back (if you turned on the vibrator and had someone call you). Synced up with our corporate email, it out-performed the Blackberry and browsed the web as well. You could open spreadsheets, documents, PowerPoint presentations, PDF’s and just about everything else. Oh, yes, you could also use it to talk with other people.
I had an unlimited nation-wide calling plan with no roaming charges. I also had unlimited web usage with the unlimited data package. I had once went over my monthly minute allowance for voice traffic in three years so it was a great plan
Every day at lunch I listened to streaming radio broadcasts of the Rush Limbaugh Show. Often when I was in the computer room I would listen to music and other talk radio for background as I worked on the servers.
The whole package totaled out at $95 per month. Not bad.
Now go ahead to a year and a half ago. The 8525 was old and on January 16th, 2009 I went into work with a request to get an iPhone. The iPhone with AT&T’s unlimited data package it would do everything the old 8525 would do – and more. All the APPS available were at that time just about uncountable. Now the available APPS are triple in number.
At $95 per month and increased productivity, it was a no-brainer. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to turn in that request.
We had a meeting that told everyone we were doing good in a bad economic climate and would need to slightly reduce operating costs, like not print out something unless it was absolutely necessary and limiting the travel between the US and France.
Of course, sales looked dismal, but that was going to pick up as the projections were good (as they always were). Immediately after the meeting and pep talk 20% of the workforce, including myself, no longer had jobs. Most of the sales force was still there, but I digress – back to the story.
I wanted an iPod but knew that without a job I would not be able to afford that $95 a month. I am glad I did not get one.
Remember I said that Yesterday was the Good ol’ days? Yesterday AT&T announced that they would no longer be offering unlimited data plans. They offered a data usage calculator to estimate how many Gigabytes of data you use.
I plugged in my usage and got 8.5 Gigabytes per month. OUCH!!!!!
That comes out to $90 of data usage and we haven’t even considered the voice plan yet! I can see an Easy $180 to $200 monthly bill. And that is not even considering the data the new APPS would use!
Now they don’t laugh when I say Yesterday Is The Good Old Days. They cry.
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