Todd Wasserman, reporting for BrandWeek:

By opting for these tin-eared retorts, AT&T does nothing but set itself up as a foe to consumers. At a conference in New York in early December, CEO Ralph de la Vega responded to charges that AT&T’s iPhone service was slow by turning condescending. “The first thing we need to do is educate consumers about what represents a megabyte of data,” de la Vega told reporters—this while floating the idea of charging heavy users more than others.

AT&T’s position seems to be that consumers are consuming way more data than the company had expected and everyone just needs to chill until the company can recover from this inconsiderate overuse. When the conceit is that ass-backwards, no amount of spin is effective.

If there's one company whose reputation has been steadily slaughtered over the past two years, it's AT&T.  The malign is deserved: I have followed the blogs, Twitter conversations and press releases as much as the next gadget/tech geek, and to me it's plainly clear that AT&T hasn't learned any lessons from brands who have had their business practices change due to consumers leveraging social channels.

But it's even worse than that.  They view iPhone users as the problem that led to their damaged brand, not their shoddy network to begin with or nearly flat capital expenditures since the iPhone's inception.

As a realtively new AT&T customer (who joined simply because of the iPhone), the vibe I get is that they believe it's easier to milk this iPhone thing -- however long it goes in exclusivity -- for all it's worth than it is to listen to your customers, address negative feedback, and build out your network to accomodate your users happily using your product.  AT&T had a chance to become something special, pehaps even to vy for extentend exclusivity, but instead chose to treat the iPhone deal as a racehorse: flog it as hard as you can until it dies, keep the share price at a decent level, get your bonuses, and move on to what's next.  That sort of myopia will be part of AT&T's enduring legacy, especially when they could have built a race team and made their customers their fans.

When the iPhone opens up to other carriers in the US, AT&T will see a hemhorraging of subscribers like never before.  Given how I drop at least a call day with AT&T, I will likely be among them.

Enjoy your early termination fees, Mr. Stephenson: they're the last vestige of what could have been.

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And I give these answers:

Am I on Twitter?  Yes.

Facebook?  Yes.

LinkedIn?  Yes.

FriendFeed? Yes.

Plaxo, MySpace, anything else? No.

There.  The mysteries of the universe, unraveled.

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