I know there are a lot of haters on this board but today’s news is good news for all of T. Stankey is undoing all of Stephenson and Donavan’s strategies and T is becoming a telecom transport company rather than a content company. Making movies and content is expensive, T would rather invest in building 5G and fiber backbone than making movies. this is good for warnermedia employees too.
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No I am not.
Original Poster is an AT&T Plant.
Please. keep hating CNN. As long as you are watching.
Already under staffed, zero street cred on the recruitment side, people leaving for other opportunities. Cant fake earnings. When the wireless business went from 1/2 of the companies profits to over 60% of the companies profits, it doesn’t take much to observe the money drain that the “Ki---r App Content” was siphoning from the “D-mb Pipe”. Yes, the one that Competition recognized as their core competency and focused on making bigger, and faster. $185 billion and precious wireless spectrum given away. Sure, to be fair the pandemic has changed the business. Those caveat slides that go to planning always get removed, and pushed to the bottom of the PowerPoint. There was a ton of scrambling and billions spent trying to cob together capacity to address the emergency. Resiliency the new buzzword, was always the easiest place to cut. All that marginalization in order to rationalize not having a robust network in place for just such a response. Why would you do anything to anger the money changers and jeopardize your deal maker fees? Maybe we can write some software to compensate for marginalizing it all. How’s that working for keeping planes airborne. It’s not zero defects, it’s deferred defects for a buck today, and $100 to fix later. In the end, it was easy to see where this was going years ago. And no one was listening. Maybe if they focus on core competency of being a telecom company, it will be back to where it was before all this insanity started, in about ten years. With dish out there now (a tee vee company) running hard at becoming a wireless company, it’s patently obvious where the priorities for the company should have been. If ATT focuses on being a wireless provider, retention, and fixing their axe and can employees to make numbers strategy, maybe they can avoid achieving the number 4 position in the space
After having the day to digest this, I'm thinking the speed at which this happened indicates just how much trouble the company is in.
I thought this morning this was going to be good for the company, but I'm not so sure now. Cutting the dividend while playing catch up because they treated the network side like a red headed step child...it's going to be tough going the next few years while those who are left try to dig out of this mess.
Stanky should quit or retire after this spinoff is over.
Stanky hired Kilar!
@CSL
What do you mean he's swallowing his pride? Did he ever acknowledge his mistakes? The answer is NO, he DID NOT.
He's selling these Stankey assisted poor thought out "investment purchases" for pennies on the dollar and the rank and file employees who is doing 100% of the work are being "rightsized" off.
Stankey needs to be fired, Randy's contracts needs to be terminated AND leadership needs to be installed.
Yup, he was part of it but he is getting us out of it fast. He is swallowing his pride and offloading it. That previous US president did his share of stalling the acquisition and T spent a lot of time and money in litigation and then the pandemic. You have to change with the conditions, admit mistakes and move on. It is what it is. Stop hating, s—t happens
I've read some amazingly uninformed comments and posts here, but this one takes the cake! The OP is actually praising Stink for this TW blunder, saying that Stink is fixing a problem. Unfortunately, the OP is far too much a 'ta-d to understand that it was Stink who was one of the biggest drivers of acquiring DTV first, and TW afterwards.
So, it seems Stink is the one who created this mess, and, in typical T fashion, he thinks the way out of a massive ho-e is to just dig deeper. And total blockheads like the OP are either too simple to understand this, or too filled with all the ji-m they've aspirated out of Stink to realize this.
Having people like the OP work at T is all the proof anyone needs that the company is in very serious trouble.
Mr. Stankey just now was labelled as the worst strategist ever by Kara Swisher. She thinks Discovery is at risk on the tech factors, if not the content production and inrellectual property management side.
I do find the irony of congratulating leadership on their business acumen somewhat hilarious. Buying assets at a premium and selling them at a loss is not taught in most business schools. That said, I do believe, as a Mobility employee, that this is good news for those of us that work in this area. Refocusing on what is in our wheelhouse rather than trying to be everything to everyone, and thus not being best in class at any of it, is long overdue. Feel better about the future than I have in quite some time.
How does this merger impact the AT&T-Time Warner pension? Its currently at 92% funded with both companies pensions. If TW takes their pension dollars away from the fund, Just T dollars is left.
Hey @OP.
Stankey was in the thick of the terrible investments, i.e. Time Warner, Tmobile, DirecTV and the rest.
So he helps increase debt to almost $200 Billion, sells off all or most of the bad purchases and recovers a fraction of what was paid, what 5% and maintains a 10% ownership?
How is that gaining a TON OF GROUND?
How is that good for employees? Mushrooms are grown in fe--s and rotting material!
Stankey should be terminated. Ed, Randy and John have made nothing but bad investments since 1984 while the rank and file suffer.
The employees have not received meaningful raises since divestiture, the pensioners do not receive a COLA, the healthcare benefits have been cut - reduced to worst than Obamacare, the stock price is dismal, the products are expensive, the service average, customer service is off shored, employees are being layed off.
THIS COMPANY IS ON THE SKIDS. And............I'm a realist, not a hater.
Signed,
A Second level Dallas NOC Manager
Funny how you don’t blame Stankey for any of this. If I remember correctly it was his idea initially to purchase Directv. Also, if Donovan had been so instrumental in strategy, there is no way he would have been forced out.
Exactly.
The problem, of course, is we're three years behind our competition now. We've lost a ton of ground, but this is probably good for all us mushrooms, there should be plenty of work as the company tries to play catch up on the fiber and wireless fronts.