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Comment by askvictor | Hacker News Reader

I'm assuming you're talking about consumer VoIP; in the corporate world, Cisco (and presumably others) do a crapload of VoIP office phones.

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I also haven't seen an office phone in ages, it's just all mobiles around here.

It's because you don't do bulk calls. Sells, support, orders, etc. They all need office phones at a certain scale. Not that they couldn't do it with mobiles. But infrastructures for those kind of systems all assume a land line.

Decent deskphones are significantly more comfortable than cellphones, nevermind the better audio hardware.

You could make special apps with a UI made to help with the specific tasks, and with a good bluetooth headset make a nice mobile experience IMO. But yeah currently solid IRL keypads + phone handles are better than mobiles'.

I've worked for pretty much every type of company except VC-funded Silicon Valley style start-ups since about 2008. Every desk I've ever sat at, including the one I'm at now, has had a VoIP phone sitting on it.

In the early days at Nest, one of my co-workers had trouble with his loan application because Nest, his employer, didn’t have a phone number. He showed the bank the company’s web site, and they were satisfied. Only a real company would have an actual web site.

For added fun, the site looked like this at the time https://web.archive.org/web/20110207225932/http://nestlabs.c...

Is your entire daily experience only between your home and office and car? You don't even have to go to an office to see non-mobile phones.

You've never noticed the phones at every checkout stand in the grocery store? Or at every customer service desk in every retail store in the nation? Or hotel front desks?

When that new coffee shop opens down the street and isn't on Yelp yet (or is, but the hours are wrong anyway), how do you find out its hours? Do you ask the barista for his Facebook ID? How do you find out information about a place that doesn't have a web site, or that has an obviously outdated web site? Have you never worked in a place with a receptionist?

The only place I've ever worked that didn't have telephones turned out to be a scam operation. I don't think I would trust a company that didn't have phones.

You are almost certainly an exception. The next time you are out in public, just look around. VoIP phones are everywhere.

Hell, I have a Cisco VoIP phone on my desk in my home office, tied into $work's phone system.

(I actually have three VoIP phones here at home, but I'm a network engineer for an ISP/CLEC.)

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