Corporate Dinosaurs

Via the Machiavellian comes the best rant about Hi Tech business I've ever read, from The Fake Steve Jobs, comparing the iPhone to "Meet The Beatles" to AT&T's Randall Stevenson:

Now, the thing about that album was, on the day it hit the U.S. the whole world changed. Like, before that day, the world was one way, music was one way, culture was one way — and then after that day the world was never the same ever again, and as soon as you heard that album you knew that, and even if you were only nine years old, which I was, you just knew. You knew. Sales were crazy. I mean nuts. The thing was a huge smash hit. By April, twelve weeks after that album came out, the Beatles had the top five spots on the Billboard chart.

Now there was a lot of demand for that record — so much that the plant that printed the records could not keep up. Now here’s the lesson. Do you think the guys who were running Capitol Records said, Gee whiz, the kids are buying up this record at such a crazy pace that our printing plant can’t keep up — we’d better find a way to slow things down. Maybe we can create an incentive that would discourage people from buying the record. Do you think they said that? No, they did not. What they did was, they went out and found another printing plant. And another one and another one, until they could make as many records as people wanted.

Randall is like, Okay, I get your point. I’m like, You know what, I don’t think you do, because if you did, we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation, would we? I mean if you did understand how to do things, your guys wouldn’t be standing up at Wall Street conferences and complaining about how much traffic you’re getting. Instead, you would be running around like a fucking maniac trying to build out your fucking network and make it the best network in the world — and the only reason you would ever need to talk to me would be to thank me for creating a phone that’s so amazing that it draws people to your shit network in the first place.

There's more. I'm in awe, really.

One of the best arguments for small government is big business. The bigger the business, the more likely they will spend more time lobbying Congress for unfair advantages, rather than working to win the market by providing goods and services that their customers would rather buy. Google "regulatory capture" for a million examples.

Look, I'm not even an Apple fanboi, and I broke down and got another iPhone. Yes, it's a closed system (spit) that won't work with Linux. Yes, I have to take it the way His Steveness wants, because it's His way or the highway (no cut-and-paste until version 3.0).

It's the best damn piece of pocket tech ever created. I can open my address book, and click on someone's location, and it will read me driving directions to their stinkin' house, via GPS from a satellite in outer freaking space. And then I can post on my blog about what we did. It's so good that I use it despite the inability to sync with my Linux computers. And AT&T wants to slow this down?

When Jobs (the real one) introduced the iPhone, people missed the most important thing he said. "It's the Internet in your pocket." I guess that Randall Stevenson missed that, too.

Hey AT&T, any time you don't want my stinking iPhone bits on your network, just let Verizon take over the contract from Apple. You won't have to worry about too many customers, slowing everything down.