The Men Behind the Apple-Verizon Deal

It wasn’t Steve Jobs and Ivan Seidenberg that worked out the details of the Apple-Verizon iPhone deal. It was Apple COO Tim Cook and Verizon President Lowell McAdam. 

In 2010, at last, these two Apple and Verizon executives worked out the details, according to Bloomberg-Businessweek on Wednesday. Once the technical details were worked out, the rest came fairly easy. “We said over the last three or four years that the business interests would come together,” Mr. McAdam told BW. But many observers, all along, fueled by the rocky relationship between the respective CEOs, thought it would never happen because of Verizon’s previous policies in dealing with handset makers.

However, in the end, only Apple’s name appears on the Verizon iPhone and Verizon doesn’t load any of it’s own apps. The booming success of the Apple-AT&T relationship seems to have influenced Verizon’s McAdam.

In addition to building cell towers on Apple’s campus for testing, the two companies reached an even more remarkable agreement: swapping information about each other’s plans. “We had to share with them where we were going with our network and they had to share with us what they were planning for devices,” Mr. McAdam said.

Most analysts believed that it was in the financial and strategic interests of the two companies to eventually work together, even as they argued over which company needed the other the most. Fortunately, the two companies found both common ground and the right two men to make it work.

In fact, this may have been one of the major, challenging assignments in Mr. Cook’s path to become future Apple CEO. He passed with flying colors.