Today's NY Times (7/12/99)
Long piece on all the players.
Here's a snippet.
At Qwest, the shift in focus toward the top of the food chain has
happened in fast-forward, and some investors have found it
unsettling.
When the company first offered shares to the public in 1997, it
was seen on Wall Street as a bandwidth play. Investors
expected Qwest to concentrate on using the latest technology to
build a long-distance network with more, and cheaper, capacity
than those of companies like AT&T or MCI, letting the upstart
take market share away from slower, less-advanced
competitors.
Over the last year, though, Qwest has repositioned itself as --
surprise! -- a provider of advanced communications services for
end users. This year alone, Qwest has announced partnerships
with companies including KPMG, BellSouth, Siebel Systems,
SAP America, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and Automatic Data
Processing's Brokerage Services unit to develop high-margin
applications like software for sales forces, aimed at various
market segments//cut for space.
And now, Qwest is making an unsolicited run at acquiring
Frontier, a long-distance company that also owns Globalcenter,
one of the biggest Web-hosting concerns, and U S West, the
regional Bell company based in Denver. U S West is the
slowest-growing Bell, but it still has millions of customers, whom
Qwest needs for the new services it is developing.
Qwest is trying to wrench Frontier and U S West from the grasp
of another erstwhile bandwidth play, Global Crossing. While
both Qwest and Global Crossing have made cases for why their
deals make sense, their sudden transformations have left some
investors scratching their heads. |
