iPhones on Verizon? What does Steve Lim think?
—I was asked this twice in one day, so I thought I should commit my opinion to type.Heard? Not much…but I have a lot of educated guesses:
Because Verizon and Sprint are on CDMA, and the rest of the world is not, this puts them at a disadvantage as a candidate to be apple’s carrier. —Making a phone that works for the whole world and then making another one for just the US, is something that would really irritate Steve Jobs.
As far as a “company personality” Verizon is also a bad match. Until the iPhone came along, all the carriers bullied phone manufacturers. They knew any great cell phone was useless w/o a service carrier, so they would make companies change or remove buttons, change software and user interfaces “or else”. It’s not a forgiving process, like the Transportation Dept. telling car manufacturers to make airbags standard in 2 years, they will be presented with phone prototypes that are ready for manufacture, and order changes to the hardware.
Part of this personality disorder is power grabbing, but part of it is fear: they don’t want to be just a bunch of pipes for wireless data. That’s why we see all those dumb commercials for “ESPN only on Verizon” type stuff. They are trying to become like cable companies that control content.
—The worst of the bullies is Verizon. Over the years that I’ve reading reviews for the best phones, Verizon have simply never had compelling phones. I don’t think this is something of an accident. Steve Jobs also firmly believes the the carriers are just a bunch of pipes. —He’s known to refer to the carriers as “orifices”.
So that supports this third-hand report from wired (when the iPhone first came out):
“At one point, Jobs met with some executives from Verizon, who promptly turned him down. It was hard to blame them. For years, carriers had charged customers and suppliers for using and selling services over their proprietary networks.”
Verizon had their chance.
But I think the future for Verizon is what they make of it. I think Verizon learned a lesson (maybe), but AT&T hasn’t been taking their new iPhone profits and reinvesting in infrastructure. There’s speculation that AT&T service is getting worse and worse, now that there are more and more iPhone users and the network isn’t expanding to keep up with the increasing data and voice demands. So they’ll have an opportunity to be a carrier —IF they want to.
The world will be moving to a faster wireless standard (4G or whatever), and I heard that Verizon is ahead of AT&T in setting up the infrastructure. Apple is also just as unhappy with AT&T as consumers are. So when the world is ready to be switched over, they will be on equal footing with AT&T as long as they are willing to cooperate.
2 years agoThe best video I’ve seen in long time (not just because it’s the only video I’ve seen in a long time).
Wow, when I first heard a snippet of this song on some BlackBerry commercial, my first thought, was: “This song sucks, —it is simply just not anywhere near as strong as the major single releases we’ve come to hear from U2.”
But after watching this, I like this song very much.
Moral of the story: MTV never should have stopped playing videos.
San Francisco is the kind of place where nobody will tell you when you have a bad idea. That’s just how it is. In an effort to remain tolerant, people go out of their way not to judge. That can be a bad thing…
“Hey, dude, I think I’m going to pierce my eyelids with this sliver of depleted uranium for Burning Man this year.” “Right on, that’s cool.” No. No, it’s not cool. It’s a very bad fucking idea.I always suspected this, even though I know nothing of life in San Francisco. 2 years ago
Philly Goes Back to Old Logo
Someone in Philly grew a brain and good taste.
76ers Go Back to the ’60s with Red, White, and Blue Logo
Former Sixer Bobby Jones:
“…It also represents some very good teams that have played under that logo.”—That reminds me of all the crappy teams (despite having good players) that wore the worst Sixer uniforms. 2 years ago
