AT&T, can’t you do anything right?

It’s become rather repetitive to discuss AT&T’s shortcomings, but the sheer volume of screwups leaves me with no choice. I’m not really sure what demons have possessed the company, but apparently it can’t do anything right these days. Apple isn’t helping by releasing a new iPhone that dislikes left-handers — but let’s focus on AT&T for the moment.

The recent spate of problems started with the iPad email address debacle, which wasn’t really a hack, but rather an extremely poor coding decision that was simply discovered. Not only was AT&T giving out all that information to anyone who appended a suitable ID string to a URL, but the coders actually designed it to function that way. Madness! And I haven’t even mentioned the recent discovery that anyone with an Android phone can hack into your AT&T voicemail. The sheer volume and scope of these problems might be funny if these debacles weren’t so disturbing.

Then there was the iPhone 4 pre-order disaster, which had people pulling their hair out to give Apple and AT&T their hard-earned dollars. It’s one thing to have a product so popular that you have difficulty meeting demand, but it’s quite another to have developed a purchasing framework so fragile that they can’t even place a pre-order. Sitting there, trying to order an iPhone 4 a few weeks ago, I got the mental picture of a seriously overworked Pentium 4 server somewhere. For all I know, it wasn’t even that advanced; maybe the company had a few people looking through green-bar printouts to verify upgrade eligibility and then typing up the XML response manually. It certainly seemed that painful.

Actually, that speculation might not be too far off, because even if you did get through that stage of the process, you were confronted with the specter of seeing someone else’s name, credit card number, and contact information on your purchase page. Given the other issues, that seems almost par for the course. Naturally, it was a query caching or session problem, but the result is the same: AT&T has no bloody idea what it’s doing.

Keep in mind this is the company that employed Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie in the halcyon Sixties. Bell Labs invented Unix. Sure, it was broken up in 1983 for being a horrible example of a sanctioned monopoly, but you’d think some shadow of AT&T’s former greatness would persist.

I mean, can you see Ken and Dennis developing the systems necessary to handle the iPhone 4 launch? It would be 200KB in size and run just fine on a 486DX2-66. Instead we get a horrific blend of Web technologies that were utterly destroyed by customer demand — demand, I may add, for a top-flight product hobbled by its dependence on a twitchy network. Make no mistake, I find it somewhat miraculous that people are buying the iPhone despite its unfortunate, Frankenstein-like attachment to AT&T. It’s comparable to a jet engine trying to run on heating oil.

There’s been all kinds of speculation about a Verizon iPhone, and I have no doubt that there will eventually be such a creature. It may require waiting for widespread LTE adoption, but it’ll happen. As we all know, wireless technology in the United States moves at a snail’s pace compared to the rest of the civilized world. But when AT&T loses its exclusivity to the iPhone, expect a mass exodus from the battered company. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a 50 percent loss of iPhone customers, a significant base. It may be more than that, but most folks are frugal enough to wait until the end of a contract before jumping ship.

However, if AT&T continues on its current path of constantly setting fire to its own image and aggravating customers with inoperable purchasing and customer service portals, heavy data restrictions, and spotty service, the loss of the iPhone may cost them more than just those customers — it might cost the rest of the company. Granted, there’s sure to be an element of the devil you know versus the devil you don’t, but AT&T is working hard to make sure it plays both sides of the fence. Oh, what a day it is when Verizon appears to be a paragon of corporate responsibility and security.

All that aside, I was one of the lucky 600,000 that actually got an order placed last month. I went through the Apple store, and it only took six tries to pass the eligibility check. My iPhone 4 is in my hands as we speak, and it truly is an engineering marvel, though still lacking enough features to warrant the inevitable upgrade to the iPhone Cinco, presumably due out this time next year. Yes, there is the issue with the antenna, but it looks like that Apple is finally sorting out that mess.

To its credit, AT&T sent me a nice email thanking me for my recent purchase and showing me the plethora of ways I can manage my account. It was a fine gesture, but the opening line of the email was “We hope you’re enjoying your new iPhone 3GS.” Yep, AT&T sent me an email thanking me for the purchase of a phone I’ve had for more than a year — what an eye for detail.

Keep up the good work, AT&T. You have everything to lose.

This article, “AT&T, can’t you do anything right?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia’s The Deep End blog at InfoWorld.com.