If your most loyal customers depend on several teams, nobody owns them. Each team improves its own piece and reports its own metric. Nobody answers for the whole, so the company ends up competing on the one lever a single team can pull alone: price.

Italy's mobile market shows this almost like a lab, and Iliad is the most interesting company in it.

Apple keeps a public page listing which iPhone features each carrier supports, country by country. The September 2026 version tells a strange story about Italy. Of the five Italian operators on it, none supports RCS messaging on iPhone. Only one supports Visual Voicemail, and that one is Iliad. In Germany, all four listed operators support both, plus Wi-Fi Calling.

So Iliad holds the scarcest Apple piece in the market. It also lacks two pieces its rivals have. It has no Wi-Fi Calling, which TIM, Vodafone, Fastweb and WINDTRE all offer after launches spread over more than three years. And it has no shared number for the Apple Watch, which Vodafone has sold since 2018 and TIM since 2021.

No Italian operator has all three. For the customer, every choice is a trade-off.

How many people does this touch? Nobody outside the operators knows. iOS made up 36.5% of mobile web traffic in Italy in September 2026, according to StatCounter. Traffic overstates the base, though: Canalys put iPhone at about 19% of smartphone sales in early 2025. The real share of subscribers likely sits somewhere between a fifth and a third. Only an operator can count it, device by device.

Iliad would say it doesn't have a problem here, and its numbers support that. In its first-half 2026 results, Iliad Italy grew revenue 10.2% to €665 million and reached 12.8 million mobile subscribers. It reported a mobile NPS of 63 in May 2026, which it called the best among the main operators. The challenge it names is the aggressive sales tactics of its rivals, not iPhone features. That is a fair description of a price war, and Iliad is doing well in it.

Iliad has also said it is working on the Watch. In July 2026, its management said in public that Watch support wasn't ready yet. According to Univers Freebox, the reason given was that the teams had been very busy launching a new plan. Free, the group's operator in France, launched Watch support in late 2025, and it took several years there too. Free also lists both RCS and Visual Voicemail on Apple's page. Same group, two countries, two different answers so far.

From the outside, this looks like a product backlog problem. I'd bet on something else: an ownership problem. I've watched this happen in more industries than I can count.

Think about where each Apple piece usually lives inside an operator. Wi-Fi Calling and RCS sit with the network team. The Watch number depends on IT, which handles provisioning. The phone sale belongs to the commercial team. Each team measures its own piece and moves it on its own calendar, and the customer who uses all of them sits between those calendars.

The pieces with an obvious owner do get attention. Vodafone, for example, ran a promotion through July 2026 that included 24 months of its Watch number when you bought the Watch in installments. That is a commercial team doing its job well. It is also a local tactic, not a plan for the segment.

The Watch statement is the most useful clue. It is one sentence, and I won't build a theory on it alone. But it describes what you would expect when the offer has an owner and the segment doesn't. A new plan launch takes the team's time, and a capability the group already ships in France keeps waiting. Price work tends to win the calendar, because it has a name next to it.

Visual Voicemail makes the same point from the other side. As one of the authors of Apple's original specification described it, the technology is simple: a mail server and a silent text message. Every German operator offers it. In 2008, TIM and Vodafone said it would come to iPhone later. In 2026, Apple still doesn't list it for either of them, and no Italian operator other than Iliad has added it. When something this simple stays missing for 18 years, the barrier is priority, and priority needs someone who owns it.

Michael Porter described this pattern in 1996: when companies compete on operational efficiency, everyone improves and nobody becomes different. When every operator looks the same, the only story left is the cheapest plan.

The question that could break this pattern sits between the teams. Are iPhone users more loyal to an operator that serves their whole setup, phone and watch included?

I'm an iPhone user who just chose an Italian plan, and my answer is yes. That is one data point. Nobody publishes churn or revenue by device in Italy. Apple users may be loyal to Apple, but that is not the same as being loyal to their operator.

An operator could answer this in weeks, not quarters, with a cohort analysis by device: churn and tenure for iPhone users against everyone else. If nobody has run it, the likely reason is that nobody owns the question.

There are good reasons to hesitate. Iliad's brand is one simple plan, and an Apple package looks like a contradiction. The segment may be closer to a fifth than a third. Voicemail itself may be fading. WINDTRE announced a gradual shutdown of its current voicemail service starting in March 2026, and a scarce feature is not always a valuable one. Part of the delay may also sit with Apple, which certifies carriers on its own terms and timeline. None of these is a reason to skip the question. They are reasons to ask it before the next price cut.

Pick the segment that stays with you the longest, measured by retention, not revenue. Write down every team that touches its full experience. Then put one name on that segment, with the right to ask those teams for changes. The test: can that person get a change shipped across two teams within 90 days, without escalating it to you? If not, your most loyal customers still don't have an owner.

— Steve

Know a founder sitting on a decision like this one? Forward it to them.

If you want this judgment in the room, there are two ways:
1. In-house, in a role close to the CEO (Director of Product Strategy & Growth or Head of Product Operations): just reply to this email.
2. As a fixed-scope sprint on positioning and go-to-market, through WeVang Journeys.