This solidly reported piece in the August issue of Wired appears to be about the relationship between Apple and AT&T as they developed the iPhone.  It doesn’t tell you much you didn’t know about Apple, but it offers a revealing peek into the AT&T culture.  There is still a lot of Ma Bell’s DNA over there.

Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown
For iPhone fans, it really was too good to be true. A pair of Apple executives had just described the latest model of the iPhone – the 3GS – onstage at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2009. The audience loved it. The 3GS was twice as fast as its predecessor, it included a camera that shot video, and the updated iPhone operating system enabled multimedia messaging and tethering – the ability to use the phone as a modem. Just one problem: While many customers in Europe and Asia could enjoy all those features, AT&T, the iPhone’s sole US carrier, wouldn’t allow video messaging or tethering at launch. In other words, the most advanced features wouldn’t be available to AT&T customers. What’s more, some current iPhone users who wanted to upgrade wouldn’t get the subsidies that new customers enjoyed. Incensed iPhone fanatics vented their fury on Twitter. “AT&T has been one disappointment after another.” “Is AT&T trying to squeeze more money from us poor suckers?” And they punctuated their complaints with a hashtag – the Twitter convention for grouping conversations – that became an eight-character protest slogan: #attfail.
About a week later, AT&T backed down and agreed to extend the subsidy to some existing iPhone users, but that didn’t appease its many critics. In the following months, the #attfail tag would serve as a kind of primal-scream therapy, a chance to rage against every perceived indignity that AT&T had forced upon them. Dropped call? #attfail. Data service unavailable? #attfail. Bad customer service? #attfail. The hashtag popped up on Twitter more than 5,000 times over the next six months, according to research firm Trendrr. In an attempt to assuage its critics, AT&T produced a video featuring its online spokesperson, Seth the Blogger Guy, to explain that the company was facing “an astounding amount of data demand” and to detail the “time-consuming process” involved in enabling video messaging. But Seth didn’t seem to win many converts. “AT&T LIES to consumers! Seth is not a REAL Blogger Guy!” one tweeter wrote in response. “#AT&T #FAIL miserably.”

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