Voicemail Sucks
Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch is saying exactly what I’ve been saying for a while now: voicemail is dead. His reasoning is pretty straightforward, but it basically boils down to email is far superior and voicemail is simply irritating. It’s days as a productivity tool have long passed.
I would actually go further. Why have phones on your desk at work at all? If the people in your company carry cellphones, especially a new iPhone, they have a tool that can do IM, email, web browsing, and SMS. If having a real PBX phone system is important to your company so that everyone’s phone number looks the same, just forward those numbers along to everyone’s cell phones. The amount of money people spend on buying expensive desk phones, especially for people who don’t spend their day using the telephone, is staggering and tremendously wasteful.
Once you know that everyone has a cellphone, voicemail becomes pointless. If I don’t pick up? Text me. Use the same number.
Are you assuming that the company is paying for the cell phone here? Not that minutes are usually an issue for me, but if I had a different job situation I wouldn’t want to go over because all calls were routed to my cell. And I still pay 20 cents per text message, so I’m strongly biased against text messages.
Yes, that is an assumption. A lot of corporate cell phone contracts are pretty good, but as Gwen has pointed out, a lot are also not so good. Your mileage on my rant may vary, I suppose.
Good in theory, but in practice some poor little engineers have to work out of converted garages in Sugar Creek, MO, for two yrs w/ zero cell phone reception.
Speaking as one who didn’t have a cell phone until last December (and still resents being forced to get one), Barbara’s point is well taken.
One other point to consider is that cell phones seem to tend to be built to “consumer” quality standards, which means they’re made to be disposable. The phone on my desk is bigger, sturdier, isn’t trying to fit every conceivable function into 8 square inches and works *all the time*.
I agree that voicemail is useless though: at best it tells me that someone needs to talk to me on a general subject, but I stop paying attention if they try to going into detail, delete the message, and just call them back.