Frank, I wasn't going to post till your remarks convinced me that at least one other person was thinking along exactly the same lines. The timing of the T announcement was and is incredibly suspicious, as many on this thread have already pointed out. With absolutely no disrepsect intended to anyone here however, how could LU/T think they could get away with something so blatant? That alone cause me to think the puzzle must be more complex. Seriously folks, if we can figure it out, it is beyond obvious that Birck and his team would have taken about one nanosecond to do the same. Further LU/T are just a little large to play this game out from behind intense scrutiny. If LU were to make a play for CIEN assuming TLAB walks, my guess is that the law suits would stop some time well past Y2K.
On the other hand, how could T be stupid enough to disqualify a supplier? Even if they had internally evaluated CIEN's product and concluded that it was the worst piece of garbage on the planet earth, why wouldn't they continue to hold it out as a bargaining chip against other vendors? In other words, forget timing for a moment: why would this announcement make sense on the basis of substance? Maybe the old T would have been ham-handed enough to do something like this, but under Armstrong?
None of this makes any sense at all, which leads me to believe we don't have the picture in focus. I bought CIEN and of course have been hammered, as I was only hoping to add to my TLAB position at a discount and after the last TLAB CC it seemed evident that the merger was going to happen. It's not the last mistake I'll make investing but the problem is: I can't even figure out what my mistake was. There are no scenarios that I can conjure that would permit me to look back and say "oh, I left this out: the T/LU conspiracy theory whereby LU snatches CIEN--or mortally wounds it--while T eliminates a DWDM supplier and guarantees itself higher pricing and fewer choices going forward while LU subjects itself to lawsuits from here till the cows come home". Nope, not even with 20-20 rear view mirror vision, can I convince myself that that should have been part of my thinking. Any wiser heads out there? Mike Doyle |
