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The Steve Jobs Corollary: Why Apple Will Announce AT&T-Shattering News at WWDC

This is pure speculation. I’m willing to stipulate that up front. But I think it’s pretty well-founded speculation, because it’s based on two nearly undeniable facts:

1: Steve Jobs is a very shrewd businessman. 2: Steve Jobs is ruthless.

There’s also an important corollary to these two facts:

Steve Jobs Corollary: You don’t F-ck Stevie, Stevie F-cks You. That is, nobody gets the drop on him, least of all AT&T.

So, why do I think Stevie will drop a serious bomb on AT&T at WWDC? Perhaps you heard the fantastic announcement by AT&T’s CEO that they are “making the mobile Internet more affordable for more people” by axing the all-you-can-eat data plans for new iPhone users and all iPad users? Well as much as they want to sugar coat it, this is a serious blow they’re dealing to Apple. The muffled scream you just heard? Tt was the first and last gasp of the 3G iPad after AT&T just executed a partial-birth abortion. Who the hell is going to pay several hundred extra dollars for a 3G iPad when you basically need to use wifi for all your audio/video streaming unless you want to fork over a bunch of extra money to AT&T? Nobody! No one in their right mind will pay for that.

That’s not the only way this fucks Apple. We also know that they’re building a billion-dollar data center in North Carolina to do… something. And that they bought Lala not to long ago, so it’s likely thy they’re a out to make a serious move into streaming their customers media from the cloud, most likely with the help of that shiny new data center. Will anyone with a 3G iPad or a new iPhone want to stream their media from Apple’s cloud if they have 2GB per month? Not likely.

So this one announcement amounts to a massive broadside attack on Apple. But we know from the Steve Jobs corollary that you don’t f-ck Stevie, he f-cks you. Which means that Steve probably precipitated this move himself, most likely with a forthcomig announcement at WWDC (the date the new data plan policies go into effect).

What could he be set to announce that would push AT&T to make such a blatantly harmful move against their most-important partner of the last few years? Probably something to the effect of “Why don’t we see other people?” i.e. It’s been fun while it lasted, but we aren’t exclusive anymore, bitch. Could this mean the long-rumored Verizon iPhone? Maybe! Could it mean a Sprint/Clear 4G iPhone/Pad? Maybe! There are a lot of excitig posibilities, but the bottom line is that I suspect Steve is fed up with AT&Ts network problems and is about to make them 2nd or 3rd banana to Verizon/Sprint/Clear. If Steve let’s this pass and doesn’t drop some sort of serious bomb at WWDC, then i’d say it means he’s lost his (ruthless, shrewd) touch, in which case I’m unloadig my AAPL shares (or at least a good portion of them) pronto. But for now I have more faith in Steve than that.