Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Productmarketing highlights the downside of this weekend's iPhone activation onslaught:

The consumer tech world went crazy this week with the introduction of Apple's iPhone. Alas, AT&T dropped the ball on activation... as most cynics anticipated. It seems everyone including CNN reported on AT&T's problems. Thousands blogged on it including Declan McCullagh who complained:

I spent innumerable hours on hold over the weekend trying to get AT&T to actually activate the iPhone I bought on Friday evening. They finally did on Sunday, after 39 hours elapsed.

AT&T's iPhone activations certainly had some issues, but most of the reports I saw noted activation times of 5-8 minutes. Given that this is probably the biggest single activation event any mobile carrier has ever had to deal with, I would probably be pretty pleased as well.

Productmarketing's suggestion that a market-driven vendor would understand and acknowledge the problem and speak to a solution is excellent in theory, but in this practical situation a solution was not likely to pop up within that 40 hour window, so there was probably little more they could do in some cases other than wait out the problem.

In any situation, problems will occur. I would like to think that AT&T was at least gracious to customers experiencing these kind of difficulties. But even though this demand was anticipated, a worst case turnaround of 40 hours on a weekend for an extreme case isn't all that bad.