<<From actually knowing what has gone on and what took place, LU is, in fact, getting a bad rap out of this. WCOM screwed up and attacked LU for its own issues. As I have said, CSCO is lucky that it was Armstrong and not WCOM that it had its problem with. brian>>
I think it is also important to understand other motivators (besides "AT&T vs. MCI longstanding adversaries") for Ebbers comments bashing LU.
I recently read an interview done with Ebbers in a major media forum, in which he basically trashed any kind of meaningful, detailed on-going trends analysis as a means of managing a business. He said it was a waste of time. He said specifically, that, at the end of each day, the only number he was interested in was "NEW revenue per sales rep". Now, I can imagine that the very public outage that MCI/WCOM was experiencing was really putting a damper on that number, and will put a damper on it for a long time to come. Their sales force is branded on the forehead with "10 Day Frame Outage" now when they walk into AT&T accounts (or whoever) and try to woo away business.
My questions are
1) Would LU knowingly use WCOMs very public frame network as a test bed for software that had not been proven in a production environment already?
2) If WCOM technicians felt that they had properly prepped their databases (and did not want help from LU doing this), and they had a software blowup, whose fault is that?
3) If LU told WCOM after day 1 of problem that they needed to re-synch their databases and reboot, and WCOM did not do it, whose fault is that? WCOM themselves would not admit that the frame network was down, just that there was congestion.
I think LU has shown remarkable restraint regarding all this, and I think they ARE protecting their customer by not coming out and doing a public timeline of the whole chain of events, and a public root cause analysis. I wish they WOULD do this, because I feel confident they would be vindicated.
I also have seen remarks on this thread regarding Armstrong vs. Ebbers in terms of how this issue was handled vs. the AT&T response to CSCO problem. I invite anyone curious about the difference to investigate the complete professional histories of both executives. I've done this for other companies I have invested in and it is many times a good indicator of the culture of a company.
Thanks
Jack |
