I started working for Western Electric in 1980, when Bell System bonds got listed in the NY Times right after treasury bonds as being the most stable investment around. Now, after 20 years of incompetent management, AT&T is being swallowed up by SBC.
I know better than most the negatives of the old phone system. But it had 99.99% reliability with old clunky mechanical switches, something computers today are still striving for. Bell System management really believed in universal service. We all believed in building things that would not break. But it was all destroyed by an incompetent bunch of lawyers, and by Bob Allen who believed in buying things, ruining them, and selling them at a loss. They started with every advantage in the world, and threw it all away.
I was smart, and got out at the trivestiture, so didn’t have to suffer throught the meltdown of Lucent. But the Bell System was a great place, and its destruction was accomplished from within.
May every CEO of AT&T from Charlie Brown onwards (excluding the late Jim Olsen) rot in hell.
The irony, of course, is that we started with a regulated monopoly, which certainly had some problems, and broke it apart. Now, with all this merger activity, we’re heading back into a monopoly situation, but with less regulation than before. Yeah, this will be better. :rolleyes:
Yeah, well as one who got hired at ol’ LU just before the bursting of the Telecom Bubble, the rollercoaster ride was a doozie. Actually it was more like a downhill drag race against the Roadrunner with Wile E. Coyote driving an Acme rocket than a rollercoaster really. But I’m still standing, although a bit charred, and my umbrella don’t look so hot.
I’ve been thinking that the break up of AT&T was a bad thing for the consumer since the early 90’s - even before the telecom bubble burst. As the OP said: service went into the toilet. There were times I couldn’t call from frigging NJ to upstate NY because the companies involved didn’t want to talk to each other. Nothing I’ve seen since then makes me think that the lawyers who broke up the AT&T monopoly did the consumers any particular service.
Been There…
Spent 31 years with The Bell System, American Bell, At&T,Lucent and something called AVAYA that many of my clients still can’t pronounce. I was a PBX repairman that was later morphed into a customer systems engineer. I was at a time responsible for President Reagan,s office’s and residence and was often the brunt of Nancy’s Flaming Tirades.
I left when Customer Service was no longer a priority.
AVAYA just laid of 12 of the 25 techs in Orange County, CA. One of these Techs is in Iraq and when he returns he has no job!
A bad thing for the consumer?? Who the hell cares about them? The breakup was for the benefit of MCI, and they have benefited enorm… eh? What? WorldCom? Bankruptcy? Huh.
Well, they benefited enormously for a few years, and then they pissed it away; howzzat?
Please, the break up was a huge benefit to consumers. Long distance used to be expensive. You used to have to lease ugly phones at rediculous prices from the phone company. AT&T never really learned how to do business in an environment where people were not required by law to use them.
Nancy was just pissed because all of Miss Cleo’s lines were busy. She wanted an emergency wardrobe consultation in preparation for Raisa Gorbachev’s first visit. As a result of the busy signals, Nancy ended up wearing something stupid - and red.
I’m a big business customer of AT&T’s. When I visit their offices in North Jersey, the whole thing creeps me out. You have some old timers who make me think of 1977, and then a bunch of new people who are stressed because they don’ t know if they’ll have jobs tomorrow.
See, the problem is that most of those same people are still in charge. The never actually went away, they have spent the last 20 some odd years bouncing back & forth between telecom companies. IMHO that is why we have as many problems as we do in the sector. These people still act like they are “The Phone Company” instead of “A Phone Company.” Until these monopoly holdovers either die, or actually retire (and stay out) then I suspect we will continue to have these same problems.
Madd Maxx there is a fair amount of truth to what you say. I think that another big part of the problem is that with improved technology is that it is just getting cheaper to make phone calls. So the phone companies just cannot make as much money as before. AT&T even if managed well would need to become a much smaller company. Or expand into new areas.
They really dropped the ball with the cable deals and their fucked up cell phone service. They really had an opportunity to really roll out broadband and telephone over the cable TV system and give people more for less but that would have meant sacrificing their dieing long distance revenue. Or perhaps roll out a decent nation wide cell phone system. But they had a bunch of different technologies so you could not have one phone over their whole network.
They never really tried to do anything new in a fast moving industry.
They never needed to, since they *were * the industry. Never learned how to either.
Even if they did - does anyone honestly think there’s a market today for Western Electric’s rock-solid equipment and infallible service? I don’t, and I’m a telephone Luddite. Every plugged-in phone in my home except for the one AVAYA Touch-Tone phone that I need for accessing my voice mail and phone menus was built by WECo pre-divestiture. At least AVAYA has distant roots in WECo.
Just after divestiture I went to a seminar about how to take quality out of phones, since the old assumtion that they needed to last 20 years didn’t hold anymore.
But remember, they bought their cellphone business and cable business, screwed it up, and sold it. Just like NCR. I knew a bunch of people in NCR, good people all, and all was going well until they put the same clowns who messed up the AT&T computer business in charge. NCR had a pretty good microelectronics business too, which was a good match with the AT&T business, but best that I could tell the clowns who bought NCR never knew it existed. It seems the need for capital in that business came as a shock to them.
Even after I left, I’ve been a loyal customer for lots of AT&T stuff. We used them for an ISP so early that our login is our last name. But they’re selling off all the businesses we use, or are so bad that we’ve dumped them, even Long Distance.
I’ll leave you with this on the subject. The Secret Service agents’ code name for Nancy was (probably, still is) “Rainbow” in reference to all the different colors her hair is tinted from day-to-day.
It’s sad to see that Bell Labs hasn’t done much since it was made the core of Lucent. Bell Labs, as you’ll recall, freaking invented solid-state electronics in 1948 when Shockley’s team invented the transistor. A couple of guys working at Bell Labs in 1969 with a cast-off and thoroughly obsolete PDP-7 created Unix, the OS that redefined the field by being largely source-portable between wildly different kinds of machine and by providing essential abstractions for userland programs. The OS wars are over, and Unix has won.
The irony is that because AT&T wasn’t allowed to sell Unix, they turned a blind eye to the growing culture around the OS that allowed it to gain a much larger marketshare than any strictly commercial OS could hope for. Unix won in a competitive marketplace largely because AT&T’s might wasn’t behind it. I think that observation’s even more apposite now.