Lesson Learned from the Demise of the Payphone
Twenty years ago, there were over 2,000,000 payphones in America.* Today, the figure is closer to 100,000, and one fifth of those are in New York City alone.^ Once a necessity for people on-the-go, payphones began disappearing rapidly with the emergence of mobile communications. Payphone companies quickly followed. So, did mobile communications kill payphone companies? No, the payphone companies were responsible for their own deaths. They defined themselves by their product,