What's Next? The Pony Express Stops Delivering The Mail?
from the end-of-an-era-STOP dept
A few companies are really taking the new year mantra "out with the old, in with the new" mantra to heart. A few weeks after Nikon and Konica announcemed that they were getting out of the film camera business, Western Union annnounced Friday that it would no longer offer telegrams. Telegram use drastically declined after long distance telephones became more affordable, and email and the web delivered the final blow (the only telegrams anyone sees nowadays are in the movies). Of course, there is some sense of nostalgic remorse as each one of these technologies gets retired. Will emails ever be sold on eBay as collectors items? Most likely not. And there certainly never was a problem with telegram spam. Ahh, the good ol' days. Then again, you can't really be nostalgic for something that few (if any) of us have actually used -- I mean, it's almost been a week since we've been without telegrams, and nobody seemed to notice.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
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what will go next
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No Subject Given
OTOH we do use Western Union to send them money every few weeks. Western Union was smart to change their business model twenty years or so ago to focus on money transfers.
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The last sentence says it all.
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Behind a PC
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Final Western Union telegram
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Stop the World I Want To Get Off (stop)
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