trapped in the paperless, wireless, timeless and spaceless office

When I learnt about the launching of the iPhone by Telefonica in Spain I knew that something was not right. One only has to see the visual and conceptual interference that the Telefonica logo produces on Apple’s website.

Either the iPhones or the people holding them are not right in this picture.

Said that, the thrill was to wait for the big day and see in which way Telefonica would shatter Apple’s halo. It looks like a tough job, especially when you’re launching the most desired gadget of all time, but nothing is impossible for Telefonica.

Here’s a checklist with ten things to do to completely screw the launching of the iPhone, damage Apple’s reputation and while you’re at it, treat your customers like dirt.

1. Allow 200.000 potential new customers to register in a crappy flash website knowing that you’ll never meet the demand and don’t do anything about it
2. Tell everybody that you’ll be distributing the iPhone in over 1.500 stores all over Spain when you know you won’t even have that many iPhones (no link to the stores, the darn web is in flash!!!)
3. Let people to form lines of hundreds in Barcelona’s main store when you know you won’t even have 25 iPhones available
4. Don’t train employees on how to activate an iPhone. Rely on savvy users that have read about iPhone activation in blogs to guide the poor employees
5. Announce that iPhones will start selling at 10 A.M. and don’t open the stores till well past 10:30 A.M and TV crews have covered the event
6. Profit from the free iPhone publicity to open a new 3.000 m2 flagship store in Madrid, a crappy copycat of an Apple Store with a castizo twist, and tell people that you do it to boost iPhone sales
7. Make a stupid old-school pre-launch presentation for politicians and VIPs in Madrid that look like The Night of the Living Dead. Ever seen a Steve Jobs keynote?
8. Ignore that there’s a thing called Internet where fiascos get blogged and twittered reaching a worldwide audience in minutes (you should’ve learnt the lesson from ErneX when he uncovered the iphone.movistar.es website way before the Telefonica-Apple agreement was announced)
9. Tell the world it’s Apple’s fault
10. Be Telefonica

Next thing on my To Do list: wait until the iPhone is sold free directly by Apple which could be by the end of the year.