The Wall Street Journal ran a front page article today on the negotiations that led up to the iPhone deal between Cingular and Apple. While this story has been reported extensively elsewhere, the Journal's reporters uncovered a few new facts:
- Apple's pitch to Cingular was that Apple understood the Internet and Cingular did not.
- Apple did not go the MVNO route since Jobs "viewed the cellphone business as an unforgiving one, where carriers are blamed for network problems and overwhelmed by customer complaints."
- The iPhone team at Apple grew to hundreds of people.
- The design was the responsibility of Jonathan Ive, who also designed th iPod.
- Apple approached Verizon Wireless, but Verizon wouldn't give up on its demand to provide music for the device through its V CAST service and balked at cutting resellers out of the distribution channel.
- The two executives who did the deal were Glenn Lurie, Cingular's president of national distribution, and Eddy Cue, Apple's VP of Applications and Internet Services.
FYI - You can free online access to the above Wall Street Journal article and other subscription sites like mornignstar etc with a netpass from: http://news.congoo.com
Free is better then pay!
Posted by: Richard Farmdale | 18 February 2007 at 09:52 AM
You may not know this but McCaw Cellular used NeXT
technologies to power their back-end enterprise which became AT&T Wireless, which became Cingular.
Posted by: anon | 18 February 2007 at 10:50 AM
Oh I forgot to say that Apple bought NeXT and brought back
Steve Jobs.
Posted by: anon | 18 February 2007 at 10:51 AM