Commentary on a slow death

[SteveDallas]

Originally posted by Pie
I would argue that the real demise of Lucent was caused not by the telecom implosion, but by bad financials managed by those self-same MBAs. The real sin was in the debt position the company took.

I read that one source of Lucent's financial problems (among many, apparently) was that they made sales by financing the equipment, and made poor judgements about how much financing they offered and to whom. Many of these borrower/customers went out of business and that caused some trouble for Lucent.

I won't bore you with the stories, but our antiquated PBX system where I work is from Lucent. The product itself is OK (there are several things I don't like about managing it, but these are mostly typical of its vintage), but Lucent's follow-up service was so bad that I'm not even considering them (or Avaya or whatever their name is now) for the replacement.