Ma Bell
You’ve Come a Long Way Baby
“One Ringy Dingy…”
I’m sure that I date myself when recalling the days that Lily Tomlin portrayed that hard core woman working at the Phone Company who had full control over your communication. Deregulation changed everything. As a monopoly, the one and only Phone Company thrived. But when things became competitive we saw numerous phone companies now in competition with one another. The Carlyle Group in Washington D.C. acquired Hawaiian Telcom in 2005 from Verizon Communications Inc. They did it with borrowed money, and then chose file for Chapter 11 protection rather than pay the bill.
“Hi Mom”
The once powerful Phone Company has taken hard hits from its own offspring; the cell phone. Along with free enterprise comes competition, and there’s few industries more cometitive today than cell phone companies. Innovation is on the fast track and I don’t see how the old phone companies will ever be able to keep up. I see more and more people opting to use cell phones as their principle at home phone, and then there’s Skype, where you can talk free over your computer. I haven’t paid for a long distance call since getting it. Watching this all play out is going to be very interesting.
