What the old AT&T telephone tells us about FB and Apple

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Page 331 of Bill Bryson's book 'At Home' talks about the history of the telephone. What he writes about  the history of the the telephone gives an interesting insight into Facebook and social media. In Bryson's words 

"phones were originally seen as providing services - weather reports, stock market news, fire alarms, musical entertainment ... nobody saw them as being used primarily for gossip, keeping in touch with friends and family. The idea that you would chat by phone to someone you saw regularly anyway would have struck most people as absurd." 

I see a parallel in the history of telephones to the history of computing. Computing too was originally seen as providing services like accounting, payroll, desktop publishing and so on. But computing has seen a huge surge in adoption once it enabled social interaction at mega scale. Email was the the first computer based social interaction tool. Facebook is probably the pinnacle of social interaction on computers. Just like with phones, nobody originally saw the computer as a tool for social interaction. But it turns out that social interaction is what we all want to do the most with computers. (when I say computers I am including devices -  PCs, Macs, iPads, smartphones - and the network)  

It is also interesting to note that AT and T, the company Alexander Graham Bell founded to commercialize his invention of the telephone, had in its best days, a market cap that exceeded that of GE, GM, Ford, IBM, Xerox and Coca Cola combined. Can we assume that this was because they were a social interaction tool provider which made them worth more than businesses that solved specific business or personal problems. Is this why Facebook is worth so much? There is an alternate view too. AT and T was a regulated private monopoly which may be the reason for its market cap rather than the social interaction element. Then again, other regulated monopolies, power companies for example, were never worth as much.

Another interesting parallel in the history of telephones. With the telephone increasingly becoming a 'consumer' device, AT and T commissioned an industrial designer, Henry Dreyfuss, to design a telephone in the early 1920s. Dreyfuss designed a telephone that remained in use throughout the world right through the 20th century. (Dreyfuss may have copied the design from the Ericsson DBH 1001 which probably explains how Scandinavia became a major world power in telecom). In a sense, Apple has followed a precedent set by AT and T by employing industrial designers like Jony Ive to design the defining social interaction devices of the 21st century.