Michal Ždanský The year was 2006. Apple was busy developing Project Purple, which only a handful of insiders knew about. The COO of Cingular, the company that became part of AT&T a year later, Ralph de la Vega, was one of them. It was he who facilitated the agreement between Apple and Cingular for the exclusive distribution of the upcoming phone. De la Vega was Steve Jobs' liaison at Cingular Wireless, whose thoughts were turning to revolutionizing the mobile industry.
One day Steve Jobs asked de la Vega: “How do you make this device a good phone? I don't mean how to make a keyboard and stuff like that. My point is that the internal components of the radio receiver work well.' For these matters, AT&T had a 1000-page manual detailing how phone manufacturers should build and optimize a radio for their network. Steve requested this manual in electronic form by email.
30 seconds after de la Vega sent the email, Steve Jobs calls him: “Hey, what the…? What it should be? You sent me that huge document and the first hundred pages are about a standard keyboard!'. De la Vega laughed and replied to Jobs: “Sorry Steve we didn't give away the first 100 pages. They don't apply to you.” Steve just replied "Okay" and hung up.
Ralph de la Vega was the only one at Cingular who knew roughly what the new iPhone would look like and had to sign a nondisclosure agreement that prohibited him from revealing anything to other employees of the company, even the board of directors had no idea what the iPhone would actually be and they only saw it after signing a contract with Apple. De la Vega could only give them general information, which certainly did not include the one about the large capacitive touchscreen. After word got out to Cingular's chief technology officer, he immediately called de la Vega and called him a fool for turning himself in to Apple like this. He reassured him by saying: "Trust me, this phone doesn't need the first 100 pages."
Trust played a key role in this partnership. AT&T was the largest operator in the US, yet it faced many problems, such as declining profits from home telephones, which until then provided the majority of the money. At the same time, the second largest carrier, Verizon, was hot on its heels, and AT&T could not afford to take too many risks. Still, the company bet on Apple. For the first time in history, the phone manufacturer was not subject to the dictates of the operator and did not have to adapt the appearance and functionality to his wishes. On the contrary, the apple company itself dictated the conditions and even collected tithes for the use of the tariff by users.
"I've been telling people that you're not betting on the device, you're betting on Steve Jobs," says Randalph Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, who took over Cingular Wireless around the time Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone to the world. At that time, AT&T also began to undergo fundamental changes in the functioning of the company. The iPhone fueled Americans' interest in mobile data, which led to both network congestion in major cities and the need to invest in building a network and acquiring radio spectrum. Since 2007, the company has invested over 115 billion US dollars in this way. Since the same date, the amount of transmissions has also doubled every year. Stephenson adds to this transformation:
“The iPhone deal changed everything. It changed our capital allocation. It changed the way we think about the spectrum. It changed the way we think about building and designing mobile networks. The idea that 40 antenna towers would be enough suddenly turned into the idea that we would have to multiply that number.”
After the news reached Cingular's CTO,
he immediately called de la Vega and called him a fool for messing with Apple like that
submits. He reassured him by saying: "Trust me, this phone doesn't need the first 100 pages."
nice bit of story :) can't wait to read the Steve Jobs biography by Waleter Isaacson in AJ that I got for Christmas ;)
Nice.. It's no wonder that Apple claimed a commission from the used tariff, when AT&T helped to ensure profit for the next x years.
Such stories are very good, thanks for him :-)