Personally, I think Lucent & McGinn are continuing to exhibit certain level of arrogance & complacency borne from having a monopoly for such a long time.
Network vendor market is changing as it moves from a cozy country club, old-boy, politically driven contract awards to a much more market driven, de-regulated free-for-all complicated by rapidly changing technology that drives the networking world.
The old public network vendors are going to have to learn to become mean, lean and most of all, QUICK to seize the market as the data/voice/video communication start to truely converge into a multimedia applications.
Take a look at the computer hardware/software market -- a market that has been driven purely by technology and Darwinian competition. CEO's like Gates, Andrew Grove, Scott McNeely are ultra-aggressive CEO's who are not known to compete like gentlemen.
As I recall, Grove once said "Only the Paranoid" survive in the computer industry.
I think the same may apply to the telecom industry in the next 5 years and the battle that is shaping up between Lucent, Nortel & Cisco is the mother of all battles that has so far been conducted in a gentlemenly fashion.
That is going to change -- HAS changed in fact -- to a point where companies as large as Nortel & Cisco are betting their companies on huge strategical moves that would have been unthinkable even 5 years ago.
If Lucent's CEO does not create a level of Urgency in his corporate empire that both Chambers and now Roth has created, I am very happy to say that Nortel will continue to take bigger & bigger chunk of Lucent's market!
History has proven over & over again that the fall of empire is LEAST apparent to the Empire itself as it actually experiences the changing of old guard. The same difficulty of self-awareness will be experienced by McGinn (as clearly demonstrated by this article) as his empire is being attacked from all sides.
If I was McGinn, I WOULD be Paranoid and look everywhere for my enemy's bombs --- one could eventually cause terminal probems for a company as mighty as Lucent especially where technology is the prime variable for success/failure of a company. |
