Does this make sense to anyone?
Steve Jobs is promising a lot of stuff that AT&T is not capable of delivering.
Someone needs to explain to me why Steve Jobs is a Brilliant Leader.
Steve Jobs is promising a lot of stuff that AT&T is not capable of delivering.
Someone needs to explain to me why Steve Jobs is a Brilliant Leader.
(1) Many of the Cool New Features will be consumed mostly (or in the case of Face Time, so far exclusively) over Wi-Fi.
(2) You can overstate (e.g. by focusing on the problems of New Yorkers and San Franciscans) how bad AT&T Mobility sucks in portions of flyover country.
I don’t know if Steve Jobs is brilliant leader, but he has a pretty good track record.
AT&T may not deliver, but someone will (somewhere in the world today and in the US eventually).
I remember an article 25 years ago from the Corning Glass technical magazine which argued that someday fiberoptic cables would connect homes to the telephone network and even engineers were likely to be surprised by the new applications and their bandwidth requirements.
As an analogy they used the New York City water system. The original system was built with a ridiculous amount of excess capacity (I think the number was something like 20 gallons per person per day but I could be a couple of orders of magnitude low). This was at a time when people bathed a couple of times a year, no flush toilets, there weren’t many grass lawns, etc and most people needed a few quarts per day for drinking and cooking. People have found ways to use (and waste) all that water that the New York City system provides.
The article claimed that the water system engineers took a lot of criticism for overdesigning. Hopefully, they got some credit in their lifetimes.
It’s been pretty tough to stay in the fiber optic communications business the last 10 years, but homes are now being connected to fiber optic cables (as are cell towers, which is a pretty good business).
Missing the point. Under Dear Leader O’Bummer we are charging into that brave new ‘Net Neutrality’ world…or…maybe not.
My bet is not and this is just the avatar of a whole wave of restrictions. Maybe Steven Chu can explain how we are ‘upgrading everything…’ when we still do not have Internet connections on a par with Japan or the EU, eh?
More big talk no action from a slick talkin’ salesman, O’Bummer, for Corporate Slave State America.
I won’t be buying any overpriced Apple stuff any time soon either.
As I type this from my Newton while marveling at my NeXT computer Jobs’ great successes loom large in my mind…..
AT&T has no coverage in “flyover country” so its actually worse than in San Francisco or New York.
I am a little disatisfied with my Hupmobile. And my PC Junior..
Look my Mom, who didn’t get into computing until her sixties and immediately launched into writing and performing in plays LOVED the Newton for it’s portability. And the biggest problem with the Next is that Apple wasn’t yet prepared to jump to a UNIX BSD base. Ultimately Apple mace a big committment to both.
Not every avant guard development catches on but both Newton and Next tech is integral to later gernerations of Apple tech. Christ it makes as much sense to whine about how seldom you see a UniVax installation.
I only wish all my picks had generated the returns that AAPL has over the last decade.
Get over it or short the stock.
I guess I don’t quite get the gist. Apple’s products are sold worldwide and AT&T is the exclusive carrier today only in the US.
Blame Verizon for telling Jobs to take a hike when he came to them first. On his second try, he gave AT&T a deal they couldn’t refuse, because Jobs knew that Sprint or T-Mo would be as bad for Apple as it was for Palm.
Now, independently, Apple has managed to garner the highest customer satisfaction numbers of any smartphone, according to JD Powers and Consumer Reports, despite AT&T ranking at essentially the bottom (perhaps, based largely on some iPhone types almost trying to use as much data as possible).
When Jobs came back to Apple in 97, it was almost dead, the butt of jokes everywhere, and just over a decade later it’s bigger than everybody except XOM because of its incredible growth + profitability. WTF is the problem?
PS: if it’s that the growth is unsustainable, of course that’s true… eventually. If it’s that there aren’t enough suckers born per hour, you’re not paying attention to their creative destruction. Maybe, look up “Disruptive Technology” on WIkipedia if you’re too busy to read “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”
In examining the relationship between Apple and AT&T it might be worth remembering an earlier story involving Jobs as CEO of Pixar. After the insane success of Toy Story Jobs Jobs took it upon himself to request a meeting at Disney to renegotiate Pixar’s multi picture deal to get more favorable profit participation for his team which had after all actually produced the hit movie.
Tongues in Hollywood wagged as they speculated on the beating he would take at the hands of the showbiz shark, Michael Eisner. He shocked the suits in that town when he renegotiated that deal on terms more favorable to Pixar. After a long string of successful films and multiple contract disputes with Disney Jobs announced in 2004 that Pixar would be seeking a new distribution partner once the deal with Disney expired.
Today Michael Eisner has a talk show on CNBC nobody watches. Steve Jobs is on the board at Disney and is its largest shareholder after they bought Pixar in a $7.4B all stock transaction.
I don’t know if the guy is a brilliant leader or not – I’ve read virtually all of his unauthorized bios (none of which are available as iBooks btw heh) and the common thread is: He screwed every partner he ever had including Woz. But he’s a hell of a competitor and he gets what he wants. In examining his performance at Apple you might want to consider how Apple’s stockholders feel about him compared to say AT&Ts. Or maybe Microsoft’s.
Hey look. Apple is shipping interesting devices and the world is probably a better place for that. I personally am not, have never been, and most likely never will be, a fan of Apple. I find their user interfaces anoying when they are not baffling. But I can’t see that mobile computing based on Windows CE or (God have mercy on us all) Windows 7 Home Superscrawny would be any better.
I do think there are some legitimate complaints about Apple — particularly their notoriously arbitrary, erratic and incomprehensible rules for developers. Frankly, I don’t trust the bastards and I think they (unlike say Walmart) would predate on their customers without the slightest qualm if they thought predation was to their advantage.
I recall trying to tell folks the same thing about Microsoft in the late 1990s and getting a lot of strange looks. (Prior to about 2000 MIcrosoft was actually quite user friendly — selling sort of OK, non-copy protected software that usually worked after a fashion at fairly modest prices.) I didn’t think Microsoft would stay user-friendly. … and they didn’t.
Anyway, Ken looks to be more or less correct Apple seems to be promising stuff that AT&T can’t currently deliver. And Apple’s control over and testing of apps doesn’t seem to be that great. OTOH, if you don’t like Apple’s offerings, you are free to buy something else. But note the obvious alternative — netbooks — mostly come with their own set of daunting problems. I have one sitting here that I rarely use because the OS — the above mentioned Windows 7 Home whatever — is so poorly suited to the hardware. And yes, I’ll eventually put a Unix on it. But I’ve been a Unix user for a long time and am not under the illusion that all I have to do is load Ubuntu and everything will be right.
I have a love hate relationship with the company – I’ve been an on and off developer and vendor to Apple over the years so I know how hard it is to work with them in either context. They basically begin every negotiation with the principle of “We want everything. We’re paying for nothing.”
But at lunch the other day with a friend who has had a career as VP marketing in various software and hardware companies including AT&T we both tried to think of another consumer product company that managed to capture over 50% market share while defining the highest price points with their premium offerings. It’s not like there weren’t MP3 players before iPod or smartphones before iPhone or netbooks before iPad. But they redefined those categories in ways that ignored the rules and have arguably redefined the standards in terms of customer experience.
As a stockholder I’ve had my run of fears regarding the company – I genuinely suspected that the down economy would wreck their ability to continue to demand premium pricing when every other consumer offering is suddenly “value menu” driven. But I’m glad I ignored my paranoia and held on – it’s been a wild ride and I don’t see the iPhone 4 turning into a huge flop.
So I’m guessing you were in a coma during W’s reign of error. Congrats on your recovery I guess.