A cell phone is not a land-line phone

When you call a land line, you call a place. When you call a cell phone, you call a person.

I heard this idea at a recent O'Reilly conference. (It was either E-Tech or OSCON, but I don't remember. Nor do I remember the speaker.)

In the good ole days, calling a place was the same as calling a person. Mostly. A typical (working-class) person could have two locations: home and office. To discuss business, you called them at their office. To discuss other matters, you called them at their home.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Twenty-first Century: people became mobile, and technology became mobile too.

Mobility is not a new idea. Indeed, one can look at the technological and social changes of the Twentieth Century to see the trend of increasing mobility. Trains, airplanes, hotels, reservation systems... the arrow points from "stay in one place" to "move among locations". Modern-day cell phones and portable internet tablets are logical steps in a long chain.

People have become mobile and businesses will become mobile too.

Yet many people (and many organizations) cling to the old notion of "a person has a place and only one place". Even stronger is the idea "a business has a place and only one place (except for branch offices and subsidiaries)". Our state and federal governments have coded these notions into laws, with concepts of "state of residence" and "permanent address". Many businesses tie their customers to locations, and then build an internal organization based on that assumption (regional sales reps, for example). For customers that have large physical assets such as factories and warehouses, this makes some sense. But for the lightweight customer, one without the anchoring assets, it does not. (Yet businesses -- and governments -- will insist on a declared permanent address because their systems need it.)

Newer businesses are not encumbered with this idea. Twitter and LiveJournal, for example, don't care about your location. They don't have to assess your property, send tax bills, or deliver physical goods. Facebook does allow you to specify a location, but as a convenience for finding other people in your social network. (Facebook does limit you to one physical location, though, so I cannot add my summer home.)

Some businesses go so far as to tie an account to a physical location. Land line phones for one, from the old billing practices of charging based on distance called. At least one large shipping company uses the "you are always in this place" concept, since it also uses "charge based on distance" model.

For moving physical boxes in the real world, this may make some sense, but telephone service has all but completely moved to the "pure minutes" model, with no notion of distance. (Calling across country borders is more expensive, but this is a function of politics and rate tariffs and not technology.)

We have separated a person from a single location. Soon we will detach businesses from single locations.