Global Village Communication

» see globalvillage.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

global village made modems for a computer almost nobody around me owned. that is the whole distance in one sentence. the macintosh was not something you ran into in turkey in the nineties unless you walked into a design studio, and the modem i actually had came out of a pc case.

the ladder is the same ladder, though. i went from 14.4 to 33.6 and then to 56k at home, each rung bought on the promise that this time the waiting would be shorter. global village climbed that ladder selling to mac owners while i climbed it on a ttnet dial-up account with a modem i had no part in choosing. the company died at the top of it. i kept going another six years, because broadband reached turkey late.

the company started in june 1989 in mountain view, california, and took a hard position on purpose. it built hardware for the macintosh and nothing else, at a moment when the mac was a minority platform and the modem business on the pc side was a commodity knife fight.

what made the position work is that the mac's serial ports were rs-422 while most modems were built for the pc's rs-232, so mac owners spent the era buying adapters and cables that half worked. global village built straight for the mac's ports. some of its models drew power off the adb keyboard bus instead of a wall wart. and globalfax, the software in the box, did the thing people were actually buying a modem for in 1992, which was sending a fax without getting up from the desk.

i understand this product without ever having owned one, because the category is the same everywhere it turns up. a modem is the one piece of hardware you buy in order to stop being alone with your computer. that this one was beige, or that it was for a machine i never had, does not change what it was for.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the apple years ~

the good years ran straight through apple's own product line. the teleport was the high-speed modem for powerbooks from 1991 and owned that slot outright. the powerport line went inside the machine, and apple used global village to build the internal modem for the powerbook 500 series, which is about as close to being adopted by apple as an accessory company ever gets. global village modems were bundled with performas, which put the company inside retail boxes it did not have to sell itself. it went public in 1992.

~ the ceiling ~

then the business ran out of road in two directions at the same time. the modem stopped getting faster. fifty-six kilobits is the practical limit of a voice line, and once the industry reached it there was no next number to sell an upgrade against, which is fatal for a company whose model was modular upgrades you slotted into last year's product.

at the same time apple was in its worst years and mac sales fell hard. a company that had bet everything on one platform had nowhere to move. and underneath both of those sat a third problem: fax was the killer application for a consumer modem, and email was quietly deleting the reason to send one. global village had built its whole software advantage on a use case that was being removed from under it.

~ how it ended ~

on 31 march 1998 boca research announced a definitive agreement to buy the entire modem business for ten million dollars in cash and notes. the deal closed that june. what changed hands tells you how thorough a wind-down this was. the name and the logo went across as exclusive rights, along with the inventory and the distribution agreements behind teleport and globalfax.

boca research did no better with it than global village had. it sold the division to zoom telephonics in 2000 and left the modem business, and the division was dissolved at that point. boca renamed itself inprimis in october 2000, after its set-top box unit, which is the noise a hardware company makes when it is looking around for a different decade to live in.

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