Interesting post about big banks and their inability to modernize their infrastructure, but I would like to generalize the article’s point into a bigger statement. 

In today’s world, one of the ways a company can gain a big competitive advantage is by investing in modernizing their IT infrastructure. 

I believe this is true for small companies as well as for big companies. I love working at my current company because even though we are a small (our IT team consists of 3 developers) our capacity to innovate and roll out new features to our website has become one of the main reasons why we can run around our competitors turf and continue to grow year after year. 

When you are willing to invest TIME, not MONEY, TIME in modernizing your infrastructure, consolidating systems, deprecating old software and procedures, cleaning up data, and hiring quality developers that understand the business and have creative freedom, you are doing yourself (as a business) a big favor. Because those activities, although expensive on the front end, they end up helping you once they are implemented by making you a more nimble entity; one that is able to react to the market much faster, and one that is able to roll out features and products at a pace the competition will have a hard time matching. 

From AnandTech’s research. Here are the major points:

• Reception in average conditions is sometimes significantly better on the iPhone 4 than on the 3GS
• Signal strength is sometimes the same as or worse than the iPhone 3GS
• The iPhone 4 is better at holding onto calls and data at very low signal levels

In other words:

Apple opted for good performance in low signal situations (and style of course) over maintaining consistently better or unchanged radio performance compared to the 3GS.

The reality is that for the majority of people. The iPhone 4 performs better in most situations that the iPhone 3GS does. Also most people use the iPhone 4 with a case. That means that very few ever see the so called grip of death situations.

I do not expect Apple to do any sort of ridiculous recall today. The most I see is an Apple store gift card for a free case and a call for anyone who is unhappy to return the phone with no restocking fee.