A few years ago, the telecoms industry came up with the idea of “presence management”. This was yet another spin on the idea of an online presence, and it basically meant adding chat-style interfaces to telephony systems. People could browse their contact lists and see each person’s status, so you would know who was available before even picking up the headset. Fantasies started to multiply about automatic sensors, cameras and the like, which could save you the hassle of having to manually set your availability.
This was partly a response to what traditional phone companies saw as PC-based communications platforms muscling in on their territory. Unfortunately, their suspicion of that market put the mockers on the whole venture. If they’d been willing to integrate their services with a desktop GUI, the…
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PC Pro (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2021