Direct Tv ?
Time Warner?
T mobil?
RTO /hub strategy?
My vote is time warner with the RTO /hub strategy next. Stacking those up and u see how we went from a cash heavy innovation company to a financially strapped empty shell with zero ability to innovate as talent runs to greener pastures.
Good luck to us all; the people who deserve the pain made those decisions, and are experiencing very little.
dtv definitely.
The T-Mobil deal was the d-mbest by far.
Digital Life....... might as well been selling maderna shots
The first three were blessed by BoD. CEO alone cannot go on a buying frenzy. The RTO strategy is all CEO and his directs and some genius HR consultants.
What’s done is done. Move on.
10 hours ago by Anonymous | 25 reactions (+8/-17)
Post ID: @jch+1qPwhQpw
And the same "leadership" continues to exists. Boggles the mind.
It does not confuse Wall Street though.
And @htk,
Don't forget America Online selling dial up internet & SBC not wanting to get into the internet bs.
Then when the cable companies started selling digital fast internet, Big Rice decides
we need to get into the dial up business. As competition started to eat our lunch
Big Rice decides we need to install DSL with the blinding 1Mbps down & what appeared to be 1/2 KB down. Then Vonage started cheaply selling, then OOMA VOIP offered free and Big Rice said it doesn't work & no one will buy it all the while the cable companies offer their blend of VOIP digital phone. This company has made it a habit to be a day late & dollar short.
Interesting inclusion @fgz+1qPwhQpw of Ed Whitacre's acquire, acquire, acquire strategy.
That worked better than the other Baby Bells' strategies. With BellSouth, SBC nee AT&T was able to fully own Cingular. I think it was a smart move.
Add these bonehead moves to the list:
Missed opportunity on cloud. Imagine a company with secure, high floor-load square footage available in major metro areas nationwide not for switches but co-located server farms. Buy a bunch of racks full of blade servers, sell fixed IP addresses, and voila, cloud storage before it was called that.
I guess Amazon had the more organic development, a need for data storage and processing to conduct its own business. But so did the phone company.
Could have capitalized on virtual office, but nope. Failed to see business opportunity there and instead spent $120 million to make a nice downtown plaza. Yaay.
Doubling down on shrinking dish and cable franchises, not the smartest move. Thinking they could do a better job at HBO than HBO, idiocy borne of hubris.
RTO is a veiled layoff strategy both here and at other companies, terrible for morale. Snuffed out any sense of loyalty from me and many others in my org.
The TMOB attempted acquisition was the biggest mistake. TMOB was not requesting any breakup fee, that's right! Randall with his arrogance along with Stankey and his arrogance, were so sure the deal would be approved they upped the ante. What a couple of goofballs! To think how things could have been with both at&t and TMOB walking away with no obligations. Instead at&t gives upGod! In cash and a boatload of prized spectrum. Good god!
RTO and the way it has been and is currently being handled. Imploded employee morale in one fell swoop.
Tmobile deal. I'm another one who saw the government shooting that down. Nothing but hubris to think a Democratic administration was going to let two of the big three mobile carriers merge. The Clown-suite thinks it can do no wrong.
DTV was the d-mbest. Which led to the Time Warner deal, which was d-mb. Relo is d-mb, unless the goal it to cut people. RTO as much as I hate it, makes sense for a lot of teams, but not everyone. The one size fits all doesn’t make sense. TMO buy made most sense from company perspective, the d-mb move was the breakup fee and not researching it beforehand.
I would say T-Mobile because even I knew it wouldn’t be approved. It cost AT&T so much in $$$ and spectrum because of the failed acquisition and they have nothing to show for it. At least with DirecTV and Time Warner they have been receiving revenue since the purchases.
What’s done is done. Move on.
The DirecTV deal was overpriced and over leveraged, but at least had a plausible revenue benefit at the time. The Warner deal was just straight up corporate su----e. I could not think of a company less suited for integration into T. I hope the Harvey Weinstein parties were worth it.
You forgot to include the Ed Whitacre SBC great -------
"We gotta get big" idea as he bought up baby Bells -- Ameritech, PacBell, Bell So. & AT&T for Billions more than your list combined in order to get their 1A, 1E, 4E, DMS & LU class 5 legacy switches. Unfortunately,
that was slightly before Cellular usage exploded and the above switches with their
Land Line service died on the vine.
This company has been running on empty since Jan 1984.
Completely agree. Time Warner was the costliest, adding to it that T - without having any experience running a media company tried to force their management styles in...
After the fact, the RTO/hub strategy is all a ruse to shed employees and get creative by making more leave quasi-voluntarily...