Even a guy like Steve Jobs doesn't wake up one morning knowing how to build a phone, especially an iPhone. That's why when Jobs had questions about the design of the phone back in 2006, he called AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega for help. However, Steve Jobs typically got angry when Ralph de la Vega told him his phone needed a keyboard.
In their conversation, Jobs asked de la Vega how he could make a really good phone, a phone that would have a really good design on the inside and wouldn't use a keyboard. De la Vega, in turn, sent Jobs a guide that the company sent to suppliers interested in building phones for their own network. Unfortunately, the first 100 pages were about how to build a good keyboard for the phone, not about designing the inside.
De la Vega recalls in Forbes:
“So, send it to me. ” And so I send him the email. Thirty seconds later, he calls me back. “What the…? What is this? You sent me this huge document and the first 100 pages are about the regular keyboard, ” de la Vegas said, laughing. “Sorry, we didn’t remove those 100 pages, Steve. Forget about them though. They don’t concern you. ” He said, “Okay,” and hung up.
However, de la Vegas's telling Jobs that "this is none of your business" had some repercussions. He was accused of blasphemy by the company's Chief Technology Officer for telling Apple that it didn't need to follow their guidance, and was called crazy.
But it probably wasn't.
