"Hello, and Welcome to...."

If you read the title of today's post and were immediately able fill in the rest of the sentence, then you are the by-product of a time when digital technology began.  No, this was not the internet.  This was the telephone.

Not too long ago the phone was analog and those content/data hungry, but unfulfilled phone lines were begging to be used more fully.  Remember what a dial-up modem started as?  We would put the phone receiver in a cradle where the microphone could hear the modem sending the data sounds through the phone. And then came push button phones that allowed for tones to be sent.  That was the beginning, for those tones meant ways to capture choices, like "yes" and "no".  Shortly thereafter, we got "Moviefone", or as we may remember it, "777-FILM". 

It was a cultural smash hit.  We called it to just see how it worked.  And, worked it did for a long time. Until this week. We have reached the end of that technology arc.  It's come and gone, replaced by links, touches and apps.  What does that tell us about how fast technology moves?  What does that tell us about our own relevance?  Are we still using the same approach as we did before:  "Hello and Welcome to Moviefone?" 

If so, it's time to change.