Voice
Communication in Business Volume 2
Essays on telecommunications,
1981-2002
The
following article is not intended to put down Northern Telecom or
their Brilliant New Star, the Norstar key system. The Norstar is, so
far as I can tell, a pretty good product with a lot to offer. But
somehow, by mistake or design, I found myself at the pep meeting for
the interconnect and other sales people Northern Telecom wanted to
fire with enthusiasm for the great battle in the marketplace.
Needless to say, I am not a salesman.
This is
one of a number of articles I wrote for Ian and Lis Angus's several
Canadian telecom magazines. It appeared in the May, 1988, issue of
Telecom Systems and Strategies.
A Brilliant New Star
(Telecom Systems & Strategies, 1988)
Northern Telecom and I
both took a chance. And we both lost. They invited me to the
launching of their new key system, and I, like a boob, accepted.
It started when I found
a slip in my mailbox warning me I had a package. I usually walk up
to the post office for the mail, so a package can sometimes be a
bother to carry home. But this one was light, and turned out to be a
cheap cardboard tube with a picture of northern hemisphere stars
inside. By noting which end is up, it is possible to detect what
stars should be in the night sky. In disgust, I threw it in the
waste basket.
But there was a letter
with it, inviting me to come see their "brilliant new star." They
even suggested they would pay all expenses. That isn't much of an
incentive; air travel these days is so unpleasant that a free ride
is simply not worth the effort. So I called Consultant Liaison to
find out what it was all about. The first person I spoke to was
reluctant to say; I could take it or leave it, sight unseen. But
someone else called me back later, and explained that it was a new
digital key system and she thought I might really be interested. I
asked if there would actually be more information available than I
might find in a standard press release, and she assured me I would
get all sorts of useful information. So I agreed to attend.
When I got to Dallas,
March 22, I discovered that I was one of about 300 people. Most of
the other attendees were interconnect vendors or customers of
Northern, and the idea was to impress sellers and customers alike
with the brilliance of Northern Telecom and their new star. That
night, after a cocktail party, we went into a gigantic cavern set
for dinner and illuminated by candles and faint projections of stars
from a lighting system that would have made a small TV station
jealous. At the front of the dim cavern, a stage with a double width
slide or movie screen displayed a star logo; a podium off to the
left was illuminated more brightly.
An MC leaped to the
podium and made effusive remarks of welcome. Then he introduced the
before-dinner speaker: Jim Lovell, the astronaut. "Let's give him a
great big hand!" Lovell gave a witty and entertaining talk, but the
subject matter was primarily how to go to the bathroom in a space
capsule. This is a technical problem of no small difficulty and
obviously of some importance, particularly to astronauts. Lovell
described it well and in surprisingly good taste, but I did not feel
that the astronaut had given me much insight into a brilliant new
star.
After dinner, the master
of ceremonies, who turned out to be someone named Alan Fraser,
General Manager of Northern's Meridian Key Division, introduced a
ventriloquist: "Let's give him a great big hand!" I slipped away,
went to my room, and sacked out.
The next morning at
breakfast, I ran into Dick Kuehn. We discussed ostentation with
intent to impress as currently employed by the telephone industry
and Dick regaled me with tales that made your average Roman orgy
pale into blandness. That we were well on the way to another such
adventure seemed evident.
Then the grand event
itself started. The meeting room, where dinner had been held the
night before, was flooded with rock music exhibiting the high level
of harmonic distortion normally associated with that art form, and
laser lights were snapping and flashing in the dim ambient. Then
Alan Fraser came forth again to do the MC bit, demanding "A great
big hand" for every speaker, before and after each talk. We got
first a description of how brilliant Northern Telecom was to
recognize the existence of the key system market. Then somebody else
made some further irrelevant comments. I had the feeling of being at
a revival meeting, but, instead of eliciting "Amens" from the
audience, the desired response was "a great big hand!"
Finally, with a mighty
burst of music and sound, Fraser introduced a wide-screen video of
the "brilliant new star." The music blasted, lights flashed, and
eventually, the mountain labored and brought forth a key system.
It's name was Norstar, not quite the same as a large Rolm
distributor, Norstan.
A deafening silence
followed the video; Fraser had forgotten to demand "a great big hand
for our brilliant new star," and nobody clapped, or made any other
sound. Then Fraser introduced a speaker who was going to give us the
technical details of this wonder. Turns out that Norstar has an LCD
display on its phones that can be used for messages or cueing users
through the more complex features, like the Mitel Superset 4. And
each set has its own serial number in a ROM which can be read out by
the system to simplify set relocation, like TeleNova and SRX.
Finally, an interface board can be put into a PC to make it a
station on the key system; not only could it talk to other PCs, it
could talk to the system control to carry out various system
functions. Like a Mitel SuperSet 7. Unfortunately, Northern Telecom,
like Rolm/IBM with the Redwood, will not be ready with data
communication for a while yet. Whether or not a PC talking to the
system control, like the Rolm REMS system in 1979, constitutes data
transmission, was not made clear.
After the break, we had
a talk by a Spanish-speaking business man who congratulated Northern
Telecom for making its visual prompts available in Spanish and
French as well as English. Then the only truly useful talk of the
morning came from a customer who had participated in one of the
field trials.
After a final talk by
Roy Merrills, a Northern Telecom executive, to sanctify the
proceedings, Fraser asked us one more time for "A Great Big Hand for
the Brilliant New Star!" and enforced his demand with a blast of
rock music that transcended anything yet heard in terms of both
level and harmonic distortion. Dick Kuehn was fast, but I nearly
trampled him going through the door. Later, I looked back into the
meeting room and saw that the rock music had been a fanfare to
announce the appearance on the stage of a gigantic papier mache
model of one of the Norstar telephone sets. I hope somebody was left
to give it a great big hand.
About that time, Harry
Newton rushed in. He, being a brilliant star of telecommunications,
not necessarily new, was welcomed effusively. Yes, they had copy for
him. Yes, they had photographs for him. "I have a great headline for
you," Harry chortled. "A class act!" I, personally, always wonder
what a class act or a quality product is. High class? Low quality?
Or is it just a way to say something ambiguous one hopes will be
interpreted favorably? Perhaps the latter. Harry is pretty smart,
and, after all, he hadn't been there to experience the festivities
first hand.
In the afternoon, there
were displays of the hardware, demonstrated by otherwise sensible
individuals dressed up in what somebody explained to me were space
suits to match the brilliant new star. Although one of the general
ideas behind Norstar design was "simplicity," I was surprised at how
many of the space-suited individuals had to confer with one another
to find out how to make the system work, and how some of the more
obscure features required three-digit feature codes.
One of my favorite tests
of modern systems is to see if they can do at least some of the
simpler things customers grew to expect with 1A2 key. The Norstar
does some things fairly well, but does not permit you to join me on
line three by simply depressing the line button so that we can talk
to some distant party in a conference connection. Rather, one has to
go through a well prompted but more convoluted procedure with soft
function keys.
There were also
workshops. I went to one where a sort of property management system
for lawyers, developed with the help of the American Bar
Association, was described. The speaker was quite good, and it took
me a while to realize he was using a very sophisticated
teleprompter. After his talk, I spent a pleasant ten minutes with
the outside supplier who provided the teleprompter, and learned
vastly more about that technology than I did about key systems
during the whole day.
On the way back to the
airport, I tried to calculate what the party had cost. About 300
people were reported to have been brought in; most of them had spent
the night in an expensive hotel, and two meals plus breakfast had
been provided. Maybe $700 a person? Maybe $200K, not counting the
lost productivity of all the people in space suits?
I pulled out the
complimentary copy of USA Today provided by the hotel. One
obscure story described Bishop College, a small black liberal arts
school in Dallas that was struggling to stay open at least until it
could graduate its seniors. The college's debt was huge but, if it
could raise $25K a week for another eight weeks to pay current
expenses, graduation would take place. $200K. That's all it would
take. I sent them a small check. Not much, but I had to do something
after indulging myself in the lap of luxury for a day and a half.
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