First off, I am heavily into NT so everyone understands my bias.
What I would like to say, readin the LU posts here is that the REAL issue is not being discussed.
Whether there is a revenue recognition problem or aggressive accounting problem or sales comp plan problem, ALL these issues are small compared to ONE glaring problem.
LU mgmt appears to have completely misread their market in terms of customer demand and where the technology is going (i.e. optical networking). How is this possible for a company like LU? I mean, they are literally involved in every conference, RFQ's and major technical standards setting bodies................not to mention their ownership of Bell Labs -- one of the best R&D outfit in the world.
If the Mgmt of LU (i.e. McGinn & his advisors) is capable of missing such a huge technology Paradigm Shift (or inflection point as Andy Grove coined it), how can you guys have any confidence that they will not have more problems managing this company back to health?
In the networking infrastructure business, technology and market conditions are moving at the speed of light (sorry for the pun) and Lucent mgmt has proven once again that even if you change the name of the corporation, the old problems didn't go away.
LU has such a large base and market share that my take is they have WAY more to lose as the pace of technology changes ever more rapidly and there are hundreds of new start-ups hungrily eyeing LU's market share (and NT's and CSCO's). NT and CSCO to their credit have moved so much faster to embrace the technology shift and to buy the start up companies than LU has.
I think there is lot of downside left in this company unless they get a new CEO who understands the concept that "Only the Paranoid will Survive" in the Internet age.
NT has accepted the challenge and Roth has the entire company going at full speed to try to merge data into their Voice expertise along with host of other related technologies(optical, wireless, DSL, CSR, etc.) |
