This issue's essay is about ZapMail, a business Federal Express tried
and failed at. ZapMail was meant to be a proprietary fax delivery
network, launched with great fanfare in 1984 and unceremoniously
killed by 1986.
FedEx understood that faxing documents would be both valuable and
cheap. They didn't understand that their customers understood this
too, and that the fax network would not be built by a few large
corporations but by millions of individual, one fax machine at a time.
The fax machine was the first time the telecommunications network was
extended by its users, but it won't be the last. The story of ZapMail
holds important lessons for today's telephone companies, facing
threats to their business from WiFi wireless networking and Voice over
IP (VoIP) telephone service, as the network's edges become
increasingly owned by the customer.
