I was planning on making a humorous and pithy commentary on SBC buying AT&T, and how it’s a little sad that one of the last old independent American companies would be swallowed up by merger. I was going to point to the 1994 "You Will" ad campaign — the only one I can remember, really — and lament how they wouldn’t be the company to bring us all these great technological advancements.
Of course, I went back and actaully watched the ads and noticed remarkably that a lot of those advancements actually have been realized, or will shortly, albeit not with all the futuristic metallic-but-bulky furnishings. And granted, most of them were not thanks to AT&T.
Things like automatically calculating everything in your shopping cart isn’t far off with RFIDs; the idea that you could purchase concert tickets from an ATM has been realized, although with the Internet instead of the ATM; conferencing people around the world using a shared whiteboard is a reality. Instead of receiving a phone call on your wristwatch, we have worldwide coverage on tiny cell phones with tiny headsets. Instead of whipping out your credit card and scanning it through your car’s in-dash computer screen, we have automatic toll booth systems like EZ-Pass.
Some of the more outrageous ideas like real-time language translation of phone conversations or semi-sentient digital assistants are either impractical or quite a ways off, and others like videophones have pretty much lost their appeal like the flying car, but it’s pretty amazing to see the technological improvements in our daily lives, however incremental, over the last ten years.
So my idea didn’t really work out. Oh well. I still must say though, the government-sanctioned monopoly which kept it going for 120 years notwithstanding, it’s still sad to see an old American icon going.