The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T

A classic Fake Steve post – read the full essay (and, at current course and speed, look forward to the day when you can use your iPhone on a non-AT&T network)

I stopped, then. There was nothing on the line. Silence. I said, Randall? He goes, Yeah, I’m here. I said, Does any of that make sense? He says, Yeah, but we’re still not going to do it. See, when you run the numbers what you find is that we’re actually better off running a shitty network than making the investment to build a good one. It’s just numbers, Steve. You can’t charge enough to get a return on the investment.

Now there was silence again. This time I was the one not talking. There was this weird lump in my throat, this tightness in my chest. I had this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow decline.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T