Tuesday, May 21, 2013

The Desk Phone’s “Time Has Come and Gone.”

By Mark Milian

Like most of his colleagues at Evernote Corp., Amitabh Handa no longer partakes in the morning ritual of wading through voicemails when he arrives at work. The reason is simple: He has no desk phone.
Of the 285 employees at the productivity-software maker based in Redwood City, California, just seven have landlines, most of them for customer support. So Handa uses an iPhone as his sole device.

It's a similar situation at Facebook with its staff of about 4,900, and at Google, which gives smartphones -- mostly Androids, of course -- to the majority of its 53,000 workers. At Box, a maker of cloud-storage software, employees recently received iPad Minis for checking e-mail and making business calls via Skype.

Silicon Valley companies big and small are pulling the plug on desk phones in favor of mobile devices. While consumers have been cutting the cord for years, businesses are joining the trend at an accelerating rate thanks to the increasing capabilities of mobile devices, which make it easier for workers to be productive and stay connected from any location at all hours.[...]

The desk phone’s “time has come and gone,” said Phil Libin, Evernote’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “It’s just a big distraction.” For those who must conduct a phone call, Evernote is planning to install phone booths where employees can have conversations that won’t disrupt their colleagues, he said.

“They probably won’t have phones in them,” Libin said. “We definitely don’t want to encourage phone use.”

Read the full story here.

2 comments:

  1. My iPhone is awesome with all the apps!

    If only it didn't sound like shit compared to any land line since circa 1970!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is true for people who don't spend 8 hours a day on the phone. Work sales day in, day out on a cell phone and you end up with a headache at the end of a day.

    ReplyDelete