Verizon discourages users from purchasing an iPhone because it costs more for them to subsidize iPhones than it costs them to subsidize other phones. It has nothing to do with 3g or 4g.

The self-serving statements were from an HP exec who wants to excuse the fact that HP wasted $1.2 billion.

"The Other Half of 'Artists Ship'" presumes that large organizations are motivated by efficiency and effectiveness. This presumption completely misunderstands large organizations. Large organizations come to exist because they have tapped into a large reliable long-term cash stream that can survive their collective incompetence. With their organizational funding assured, all that is left to do is to divy up the organizational spoils amongst the employees, management, and shareholders. And then the key determinant success in such an organization becomes not to be blamed for making a mistake. No employee will get blamed for inadvertently excluding a superior vendor from an acquisition process; most likely no one in his/her organization will even know it happened. They can get blamed for having too lax an acquisition process, however. No employee will be blamed for having too much testing or too much project management or too many software quality checks. They can get blamed for releasing defective software onto a production system without sufficient checks. So the internal goals of the organizational actors are perfectly reflected in the external behavior of the organization. More checks means less blame for mistakes; fewer checks means more blame. With the organizational cash stream assured, less blame means more promotions and greater compensation.