Periphonics Corporation

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

~ the obituary ~

I have never seen this company's name on a screen and neither have you, and that is the correct relationship to have with it. Periphonics built the machines that answered telephones on behalf of institutions. Its work is the flat recorded voice that tells you your call is important, followed by the numbered menu that has never once contained the option you needed. It was one of the handful of companies that made that shape of experience possible, and the entire point of its product was that the caller should never learn who built it.

It started in December 1969 in Bohemia, on Long Island, when S. Thomas Emerson and three colleagues left to make voice response computers. This was extraordinarily early. The telephone network was analog and owned by a monopoly, and the notion that a caller might interact with a database by pressing keys sat closer to research than to a product. Exxon took a controlling stake in 1971 and bought the rest in 1980, which tells you both that the technology was taken seriously by very large companies and that nobody was quite sure what industry it belonged to.

By the nineties Periphonics was out on its own again and listed on NASDAQ, selling VPS systems into the places where the arithmetic works: an organization with far more incoming calls than people to answer them. Account balances at a bank, arrival times at an airline. Late in the decade it was pushing the same engine toward the web, so that the voice system and the browser talked to the same back end, which is the ordinary architecture now and was a pitch deck then.

~ the case file ~

~ what it built ~

The thing worth understanding about interactive voice response is that it was never designed to be pleasant. It was designed to be cheaper than a person, and it succeeded so completely that the cost saving became invisible and only the unpleasantness stayed visible. Every complaint anyone has ever had about a phone menu is a complaint about a decision made by the organization that bought the system, not by the people who built it. The menu is deep because the department is complicated. The wait exists because the staffing does.

None of it reached me as a brand and all of it reached me as an experience. Anyone who has called a bank in Turkey has used the descendant of what this company shipped, in Turkish, with the same tree structure and the same key presses. That is the strange afterlife of infrastructure firms. The product form goes global and permanent, the company that invented it becomes a line in an acquisition table, and thirty years of engineering ends up remembered as a thing people are annoyed by.

~ the long tail ~

Nortel Networks agreed to buy Periphonics in 1999 for about $436 million, which was serious money for a Long Island voice company and small money inside Nortel, then in the middle of the acquisition spree that would define its last decade. The FTC cleared it, shareholders approved on 4 October, and the merger took effect on 12 November 1999. The technology was folded into Nortel's own voice product line and the Periphonics name faded out over the next couple of years.

Then the buyer died too. Nortel went into bankruptcy protection in January 2009, the largest failure in Canadian corporate history, and its enterprise business was auctioned off that December. Whatever was left of the Bohemia engineering ended up inside another company's catalog again, one more layer down. The founders had built something that outlasted two owners and remains in daily use by nearly everyone with a telephone, under a name none of those users will ever hear.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »