AT&T Shows Sometimes Success is Failure

In reading the New York Times article on Apple's whopping 73 percent jump in profits (guess a lot of people are willing to pay big to be cool), I noticed some interesting numbers. The profit jump, exceeding analyst expectations, was boosted by selling 270,000 iPhones. But the company's stock had recently taken a 6 percent hit when AT&T told its investors on Tuesday that it had activated 146,000 iPhones in the day and a half between when the phone came out and when the quarter ended.

That means 124,000 people couldn't get service turned on. That's 46 percent - almost one out of two - being ticked off that they couldn't get phone service when they were told they'd be able to have it. Wow! What a massive pile-up and an abysmal failure. This would be like having the last Harry Potter book come out but with only 4 million copies available instead of the 8 million that sold. It's one of the worst examples I've seen of operations falling that far behind marketing.