I’m calling out Tony Lewis, Verizon Wireless’ newly-appointed VP of Open Development, for saying this sentence:
“The only way this is going to work is if it’s a true partnership between carriers, devices and applications. Any independent part can work, but not individually.
Tony Tony Tony, what do you sit in front of every day? What do you use use to tell your boss about sales figures, revenues, ARPU, etc.? I bet you it is a computer made in Asia by a company who could care less about who is supplying the information being fed through the ethernet port. I bet you Microsoft never called a carrier or hardware vendor at any point during the development cycle of Excel either. I can also guarantee you there isn’t some guy who works at Verizon who makes sure that all the computers hooked up to your customers DSL or FIOS modems are certified.
See where I’m getting at Tony?
We (the mobile geeks who roam the world untethered) love that your company has announced that they’ve chosen to use LTE for their upcoming 4G network using the recently won 700 MHz C-Block, but you’re going to botch this up if you think that the only way to make it work is to make sure everyone in the ecosystem has to hold hands and sing songs just to get some signal. All this talk about open really makes me sick because you’re misinterpreting the word and wrangling it through a public relations dictionary so thick and heavy that if you ordered it off Amazon the UPS man would have to wheel it to your home on a dolly.
The SIM card, that little piece of plastic no one really cares about, has done more to innovate this industry than the people in your office building will ever do or even dream of.
So please Tony, cut the bullshit and let my people roam.