AT&T Playing Hardball With Apple?

Ponca City, We Love You writes "There's some interesting speculation from Cringley on why AT&T chief executive Randall Stephenson let drop that a new version of Apple's iPhone will be introduced in 2008. The announcement is sure to cut into Apple's Christmas sales and could also cost ATT a million new customers and at least $1 billion in market cap, says Cringley. 'It is no coincidence that Stephenson made his remarks in Silicon Valley, rather than in San Antonio or New York,' says Cringley. 'He came to the turf of his 'partner' and delivered a message that will hurt Apple as much as AT&T, a message that says AT&T doesn't really need Apple despite the iPhone's success.' What may be troubling the relationship between AT&T and Apple is the upcoming auction for 700-MHz wireless spectrum and AT&T's discovery that Apple may be joining Google in bidding."

Comments

Re:Pscht!

[Dogtanian]

Why do Brits refer to a business or organiz(s)ational entity as plural? Why do Americans refer to a large group of people as singular? Because that's the way it is, and that's pretty much all there is to it.

It wouldn't surprise me if someone explicitly ran with your argument and used computer-programming-style "logic" to argue that organisations are a single entity/object and should be referred to as such. But one could also argue (equally if not more correctly) that organisations are seen *by humans* as groups of people and are referred to accordingly. (BTW, if someone tries to shoehorn the ubiquitous-but-dreaded "car" analogy into this discussion, I'll slap them silly :)

The simple answer is that spoken/written languages aren't that logical, and that alleged logic can be misapplied by geeks to argue for either side in cases like this... in other words, the ultimate answer to your question is "just because languages vary".

Re:Pscht!

[Ma�djeurtam]

*** Whoooosh! ***

Re:Pscht!

[Dogtanian]

Yeah, I don't understand why you would ever refer to a large group of people as singular, either. I guess some people are just dense. Bad phrasing on my part? Possibly. Though I suspect that it was more of an excuse for a joke than a genuine misunderstanding.

But let me take what you said to restate my point anyway. Consider someone addressing a class of students. Would we refer to what "it" thought or what "its response" was, or would we say things like "they thought" and "their response was"?

Yet, it's a class of students.

You could argue that in this case we're referring to the "students" in "a class of students", and that's why it's plural. But the same applies to "a large group of people".