[Note from Judie - Stan sent this opinion piece in while I was at the ranch this weekend. I think it is still relevant, so here you go...]

Hey iPhone owners-in a phrase, Apple today has screwed up. Call it as is. And I love my iPhone, my MacBook Air and just about everything Apple (see my previous posts on my love of the iPhone). Even if you have one business model that produces a widget with a fabulous end to end user experience based a beautifully married hardware & software, you can still screw up big time on huge promises that lack the back office capability to execute as planned. How many thousands of new iPhone owners are right now sitting at home with bricked iPhones?

This is not a good situation. Unlike last year’s original iPhone debut, this one had a 22 country worldwide rollout. If you promise thousands of people worldwide to sell them an iPhone on July 11th, shouldn’t you plan to have the technology available to close the deal? Apple expected long lines so they should of planned for thousands of activations today.

An Apple employee running crowd control said they were staying open until 11pm tonight to sell people iPhones. This line looked to be about 150 feet long with over 100 customers at about 7:30pm EST.

Now, we may have a huge number of iPhone owners who may not get service for 24 hours or more since purchase (I would love to get a count on this). Apple needs to make this situation right for these many customers who’ve paid $200+ & signed a $70+ a month 2 year cell contract and have no working phone for a day or more. Can we get credit to these folks’ accounts for lack of service?

FYI- I will buy an iPhone 3G and make hectic use of MobileMe but not until these tech issues and the yellow screen issue are cleared up. Love the iPhone & Apple but today was not Apple’s best day.

Sent from my iPhone