
The Verizon guy who turned down the iPhone - brett
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/06/the-verizon-guy.html
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dcurtis
I saw the COO of Verizon talking about this on CNBC a few weeks ago. He says
that to compete with the iPhone, Verizon has "18 multimedia phones" with
picture and messaging packages.

But when you go to a Verizon store, and use the phones, they're all hideous
attempts to create cool devices. Why do they even need EIGHTEEN devices? The
menu systems are ugly and practically unusable, the buttons on the phones are
poorly designed-- I bought my dad a Razr K1m, and the buttons are so small and
flat that you have to grow your finger nail to press each individual number.
The Verizon devices (that's LG, Motorola, etc) all suffer from a lack of
creative design and ingenuity, because they are all pumped out quickly and
with contracts, and because the manufacturers have little competition amongst
themselves, because they generally operate in different niches, or on
different networks.

This is why Apple's strategy is so revolutionary and is going to change the
game. They've taken their crazy talent at creating easy and beautiful user
interfaces and merged it with lots of leverage on AT&T's network in an attempt
to remove all of what is bad about the cellular industry.

I think it's cool; the cell phone industry needs some shakeup now, just like
PCs did in the late 90's.

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aston
It's not actually clear to me that AT&T's actually got a net win on their
hands. I also wouldn't be so quick to call the iPhone a game changer.

This is the kind of article you write 10 years down the road, when all of the
dust has cleared. It just came out two weeks ago...

Shouldn't there be a similar story about what eventually became a
Danger/T-Mobile deal (on the Hiptop/Sidekick)?

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mattmaroon
This suffers from the common Apple fanboy logical fallacy that hype=success.

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gibsonf1
On the one hand, its very annoying that the Iphone can't be used on the best
network. On the other hand, I can understand why Apple wanted so much control
over the launch as they want to sell the user a complete experience, not just
a gadget.

Letting Verizon handle sales would have been a bad idea - they're not very
good at selling phones - I haven't enjoyed having to go and buy them at the
Verizon stores in the past.

Letting Verizon handle support would have been less problematic, they've been
great with my blackberry support, always overnighting me a new one no
questions asked the same day (happened 3 times). Of course having people have
to buy them at the Apple store gets people looking at Macs etc,so the
motivation for Apple is pretty clear.

The big question is whether running on a lesser network will lose them so many
customers that demanding the super deal with AT&T was a mistake. Time will
tell once the clones arrive.

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mynameishere
Seems like...Apple wanted a sweetheart deal that threatened to change to
overall relationship between Verizon and its other partners.

