First, we couldn't all fit into the men's room. Second, if we got any more clients, all the boxes would tip and fall in the toilet, destroying our business. Finally, as the business grew, new boxes were going to cost a lot of money. This began to look like one of those times. Some Fortune 500 firms felt it was legally questionable to boot.
People take telephones for granted.
Of all the instant things in our society, the telephone is probably the most incredible, and the one we get most annoyed about when there's any glitch. To have to wait for a callback, or a dial tone, even if it only took nine seconds, was a tough thing to sell. Not only that, but since the people who could really benefit from this were all living and working in Europe, just reaching them to pitch the idea posed a problem. Setting up an international sales force proved to be virtually impossible. Whatever lessons about absentee management I hadn't fully absorbed from my years in Harvard were now driven home twice as hard, as sales managers in France and Spain ripped me off to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.