Translating Corporate-Marketing-Speak

AT&T must surely be wor­ried about some­thing. They seem to be reas­sur­ing investors that hordes of iPhone users won’t leave AT&T as soon as there’s another option (here in the US). Today’s announce­ment that 40% of iPhone sales are to busi­ness users are prob­a­bly meant to rein­force the com­ments last week about how dif­fi­cult it would be for iPhone cus­tomers to leave AT&T (no mat­ter how badly they’d want to) because most are on fam­ily or busi­ness plans that make it dif­fi­cult to switch carriers.

I’m sure these announce­ments have noth­ing to do with the research note that sug­gests 6M iPhone users could defect to Verizon.

Of course, “just in case” they rais­ing early ter­mi­na­tion fees and look­ing to the future of con­nected devices way beyond the iPhone.

Well, for a com­pany that’s not wor­ried about some­thing, they sure are talk­ing about it a lot! I must say, I was doubt­ing that Ver­i­zon would get the iPhone soon… but all this AT&T activ­ity is mak­ing me less sure.

Of course, I had to leave AT&T because I couldn’t get a sig­nal in the wilder­ness where I live (New York City… but all the way on the west side of Tribeca), and stum­bled back to T-Mobile because of the inter­na­tional cov­er­age sup­port. I’ll be switch­ing to Ver­i­zon soon as I get clar­ity on Apple’s announce­ment next week. If not the iPhone, it’s the Droid Incred­i­ble for me, and I’ll be done with this silli­ness of phones that can’t make calls. Or, a phone with­out a browser (I cur­rently use the unus­able Black­berry Curve).

I’m quite tired of com­pa­nies whose strength is they have the most locked in cus­tomers, or they suck the least. How about doing good busi­ness? Or, delight­ing cus­tomers with inno­va­tion, or inti­mate ser­vice, or something?

And, for those curi­ous, if I have to go CDMA, when I travel to Europe I’ll work with Call In Europe to get local SIM cov­er­age to my unlocked blackberry.