Alan Williams

Was Verizon Really Wrong To Pass On The iPhone?

Yes, your iPhone sales forecasts were made by Apple's competition. They are way too low.

Let's not forget that the 10 to 20 million iPhone customers that AT&T will have by the end of 2008 will all be paying AT&T $20 per month for their, up to now, underutilized 2.5G data network.

At 20 million iPhone customers, that's 4.8 billion a year in revenue in 2009 that they wouldn't have had without the iPhone.

Verizon, a bigger control freak than even Apple is, could not agree to relinquish cell phone feature control, could not see the iPhone's potential, and screwed up big time. You'd think no one in upper management at Verizon had ever used an iPod or a Mac with OS X.

Big mistake. When they do the postmortem on Verizon's corpse, the iPhone will be mentioned by one and all.

iPhone: Apple Making All the Wrong Moves

@ aerius,

The iPhone has a Unix OS that is capable of running a desktop computer inside of it. That OS X inside is capable of running very complex programs on the iPhone. Real games, Excel, Powerpoint and Word clones, the possibilities are endless. The Prada has a below average cell phone OS. The two phones are not the same.

@ Thomas Barta,

One Apple product that debuted overseas, in Japan, and died there, was the gaming console named Pippin. It didn't even have XBox's Japanese sales numbers.

@ Todd,

There are well over 100 million iPods sold so far. Almost every one of those iPod buyers would by an iPhone if they could. Most of them will, eventually. This is not a Microsoft phone we are talking about. The first generation iPhone will be very good. There is no need to wait until the third or fourth generation to get a very competitive product from Steve Jobs' Apple.
Another point, the iPhone may be thought of as a smart phone but it will appeal to all cell phone users because it is easy to use and it is also a video iPod.