Bloomberg has published an interesting piece wherein they spoke with Verizon President Lowell McAdam regarding the Verizon iPhone deal. McAdam confirms that Apple and Verizon worked very closely together do bring the product to market. For instance, the Verizon cell towers seen on Apple’s campus last July were indeed there to help with the testing […]
" />

Inside the Details of the Verizon iPhone Deal

Jan 12th 2011 by
Screen shot 2011-01-12 at 10.52.15 PM.png

Bloomberg has published an interesting piece wherein they spoke with Verizon President Lowell McAdam regarding the Verizon iPhone deal.

McAdam confirms that Apple and Verizon worked very closely together do bring the product to market. For instance, the Verizon cell towers seen on Apple’s campus last July were indeed there to help with the testing of the CDMA iPhone. Engineers from both companies worked together, with on top Verizon engineer even working at Apple HQ for a year, and Apple engineers were given their own laboratory to use at Verizon’s headquarters.

As for the negotiations themselves, they were carried out by Mr. McAdam and Apple COO Tim Cook. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg were called into the discussions as needed, but were largely absent.

“We probably worked six or nine months on the technical side of this and saw we could make this work,” he said. “Then we did the commercial side. The commercial deal took us a day.”

What I found to be the most interesting part of the report, was the agreement that Apple and Verizon came to regarding Verizon logos on the device. Verizon likes to put their logo on handsets, but according to McAdam, this wasn’t a problem for them in coming to an agreement with Apple.

“They don’t put a lot of logos on their phones,” McAdam said in the interview. “So that wasn’t a major issue for us.”

Nothing terribly shocking, but it is a surprisingly transparent account of what went on between the two companies in bring the iPhone to Verizon. Many were getting hung up on Verizon’s tendency to put their logo on handsets, and feared that this would be a point of contention for the two companies. Something small like that wasn’t going to stop this from happening, and Verizon was in the losing position. They wanted the iPhone, and if the exclusion of their logo is what sealed the deal, the logo was good as gone.

Continue reading:

TAGS: