Kill AT&T

[tw]

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

AT&T was Cingular was AT&T (in name only)

AT&T (in Basking Ridge NJ) was a company self destructing for decades. For example, they sold off the Long Lines division that installs cross ocean fiber optics just as the demand was getting hot. Anything from that AT&T was crap.

Eventually, they bought two cable companies to provide phone direct to the customer. Nobody in AT&T knew anything about phones. Nobody notices the wires could not do what AT&T bought them to do.

Eventually AT&T sold off everything two years later for half (about $70 billion) of what they originally paid. At this point, AT&T was only three months from bankruptcy. And not letting their outside Board of Directors know how bad the company really was.

Southwest Bell bought what was left of AT&T for pennies. Basically, all that was left was a cell phone company and the name. Southwest Bell renamed itself AT&T.

The name AT&T has a long history of meaning crap products - to the far fewer who actually knew technology. No company in the history of free market economics did more to destroy shareholder value than what AT&T did to NCR - according to The Economist. AT&T (Basking Ridge) was that bad a company. Notice how many consumers never knew it.