Hacker News Reader

Comment by octopusRex | Hacker News Reader

It's no longer about the engineers - it's all about the shareholders.

Right. Because organizations like the AT&T monopoly when you paid $1/minute for phone calls and couldn't connect your own equipment didn't have shareholders. This kind of idealization of the past gets old.

There was a charm to old AT&T. One that we didn't see again till peak Nokia.

An AT&T handset could be used to beat up a burglar and then still be used to call the police. They were, to say the least, indestructible.

Nokia phones were that way for a bit (I forget what model number) where you could have them fly off the roof of your car at speed, and find them run over twice and still working (assuming the battery stayed in).

The latest iPhone flying out of a plane "window" and then landing still running and unbroken was an impressive moment and harkened back to earlier times.

The break up of att lead to a race to the bottom on handsets, they were disposable in a bad way for a while.

That iPhone got supremely lucky. They stopped making them strong after the 5s body design, that was the last one with a full metal back as well as the screen fully protected on edge. On the next generation “bar of soap” body the glass bulges out so when you drop it, often it lands glass first right on the edge and just shatters.

AT&T had shareholders, but they also had a public interest mandate imposed on them by antitrust regulations, so couldn’t operate on the modern notion that shareholder value is all that matters.

Not only that, was AT&T not forbiddenn to profit from Bell Labs, UNIX would have been a commercial OS right from the start, with at very different outcome than offering source tapes at symbolic price turned out to be.

As seen by their BSD lawsuit right after they were allowed to sell UNIX.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com