As cited on MacRumors and a bunch of other places:

Denny Strigl, Verizon’s chief operating officer, decided to pass on the iPhone deal and says he has no regrets: “Time will tell” if he made the right call, he says.

Also:

Given Apple’s cultlike following, however, Verizon isn’t taking any chances. Strigl says Verizon is already working with a manufacturer — he declines to say which one — on an answer to the iPhone. “We do have a very good response in the mill,” he says. “You’ll see that from us in the late summer.”

In my opinion, what Denny Strigl missed the boat on, is that there is an extremely good chance that there is no answer to the iPhone.

Just like there is no answer to Mac OS X. It either is Mac OS X, or it’s not. Just like there is no answer to the iPod. It’s an iPod or nothing – and it sure as heck isn’t a Zune. As far as my money goes, I’m going to say that the only thing time will tell for Strigl is how bad a decision they really made.

I just finished reading a rather excellent interview that Jessica Livingston (of YCombinator fame) conducted with Joel Spolsky. The interview comes out of a book that recently went to press called Founders at Work.

Joel’s getting a little cheeky in his old age, but he still captivates when talking of technology, programming, and addressing issues near and dear to those with an entrepreneurial spirit. In this particular interview, a number of things stood out to me, but none as significant as this. Joel addresses a certain segment of software developers and says:

To them, it’s just kind of engineering step by step; it’s never the magic of creation.

That’s exactly what I don’t want for my ‘career’. To me, I want it to always be about the magic of creation. What code can we weave? What problems can be solved? What great hack can we write that reduces 2000 lines of code to 2 lines of code. Solve problems. Code for the end users. Code for the customers. Code with passion.