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.
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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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