"Here's one thing the folks at Apple could teach their friends at AT&T: how to parcel out the good news.
Case in point: the Starbucks-iPhone-Wi-Fi deal that's been on and off all week and generating all the wrong kind of headlines (see for example, here).
If Steve Jobs were running AT&T, he would have kept it simple. And a surprise. The first we would have heard about it would be when he announced it, with a flourish, as a fait accompli. Starting today, free unlimited Wi-Fi for every iPhone owner at all 7,000 Starbucks coffee shops and every other AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot -- 17,000 in the U.S., 70,000 around the world.
Boom.
What we got instead was the public relations equivalent of second-day coffee, starting with the press release AT&T (T) issued back in February. The 13-paragraph document talks about free Wi-Fi for "AT&T broadband, AT&T U-verseSM Internet [and] AT&T's remote access services business customers" but never mentions Apple (AAPL) or the iPhone -- two hot-button words that would have given the news some real buzz."
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