A Rock and a Hard Place

AT&T head honcho Randall Stephenson put his foot in his mouth on Wednesday, May 2, while demonstrating his commitment to shareholders.

At a conference hosted by the Milken institute the New York Times reported Stephenson bemoaning the decision to give iPhone users all-you-can-eat data.

My only regret was how we introduced pricing in the beginning, because how did we introduce pricing? Thirty dollars and you get all you can eat. And it’s a variable cost model. Every additional megabyte you use in this network, I have to invest capital.

Not much sympathy for him there. The iPhone was exclusive to AT&T for 4 years. People who hated AT&T would become subscribers because of the iPhone. And when its massive data sucking caused dropped calls for everyone, people not only put up with it, they bought their own mini cell towers and operated them at their own cost.

Not content with pissing off the masses with his griping about having to spend so fuckin’ much to provide service to his customers, Stephenson railed about the unfairness of it all, with iMessage eating into his sweet, sweet texting margins. Woe is me, indeed.

You lie awake at night worrying about what is that which will disrupt your business model. Apple iMessage is a classic example. If you’re using iMessage, you’re not using one of our messaging services, right? That’s disruptive to our messaging revenue stream

That clearly didn’t go down well with commenters on the article either. Because text messages are so ridiculously lucrative for carriers, and carry such high margins, it’s not even funny.

Randall Stephenson was speaking at an industry conference surrounded by fellow worshippers of capitalism (the Milken institute “believes in the power of capital markets to solve urgent social and economic challenges and improve lives”). His remarks were clearly right for the setting, and right by his shareholders, but he might’ve stopped to consider the impression formed with a broader audience, who clearly see this as greedy bellyaching. (Just see the comments on the article)