1984
The Bell System is officially disbanded in a landmark consent decree with the United States government. The Western Electric name is abandoned by AT&T. Its operations were reorganized in various forms in a dramatic close to an epic corporate partnership
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Airstream, independent local exchanges and cox will be the next purchassers
Wut?
Xandr, Inc. is the advertising and analytics subsidiary of Microsoft, which operates an online platform, Community, for buying and selling consumer-centric digital advertising. In December 2021, AT&T announced that they had agreed to sell Xandr to Microsoft for an undisclosed price. After layoffs of course
In 2006, Lucent Technologies, once an elite American technology company whose stock price had risen to $84, creating a market value of $258 billion, barely avoided bankruptcy by selling out to Alcatel, a second-tier French telecommunications company.
In a short ten years, Lucent crashed from being the profitable sole-source AT&T R&D subsidiary to a failing independent company. Employees were shed by the thousands, dropping from 106,000 to fewer than 35,000. Over 70,000 American jobs disappeared from the company. Large chunks were sold off at bargain prices for cash. Others were shut down to lessen an overwhelming negative cash flow.